Straubing

Straubing is a Bavarian town on the Danube that preserves the medieval market-square atmosphere that Munich has sacrificed to cosmopolitan ambition. This Lower Bavarian settlement of 48,000, halfway between Regensburg and Passau, has maintained its architectural identity with a fidelity that makes it one of the most atmospheric small towns on the entire Danube.

The Stadtturm — the city tower rising from the center of the elongated market square — provides the visual anchor for a townscape that has changed remarkably little since the Gothic era. The square itself, one of the longest and most handsome in Bavaria, is lined with burgher houses whose painted facades, ornamental gables, and arcaded ground floors create a living textbook of Bavarian commercial architecture from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries.

The Gäubodenmuseum houses one of the most important Roman treasure finds in Bavaria — the Straubing Roman Treasure, a collection of parade armor and cult objects discovered in 1950 that demonstrates the sophistication of Roman military life on the Danube frontier. The Ursuline Church, a masterwork of the Asam brothers whose Bavarian Rococo interiors represent the style at its most delirious, provides the town's most spectacular interior.

Uniworld River Cruises includes Straubing on Danube itineraries. The annual Gäubodenvolksfest, held each August, is Bavaria's second-largest folk festival after Munich's Oktoberfest — serving the same beer, sausages, and communal exuberance at a fraction of the crowds.

May through October provides the best conditions. Straubing is the Bavaria that existed before tourism discovered it — a market town of Roman treasures, Rococo churches, and Danube-front beer gardens that practices Bavarian Gemütlichkeit without performing it.