Augsburg Germany

The official reading is that Augsburg, set astride what used to be known as the Claudian Road, the trade artery linking the Adriatic with the North Sea, was founded in 15 B.C. as a fortified encampment by two famous Roman generals, Dru sus and Tiberius, both stepsons of Augustus Caesar. They called it Augusta Vindelicorumthe citadel of Augustus in the land of the Vindelicians (the Celtic tribe they had subjugated). A heroic statue of Augustus, cast in 1594, tops the elaborate fountainone of more than a hundred in townin front of the Rathaus. In A.D. 98 Tacitus referred to this City of Augustus as exceedingly splendid, and since then there has been no dearth of other testimonials.

Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I was so fond of the town and spent so much time within its walls in the late 15th and early 16th centuries that he was known, among other titles and honors, as Augsburg's other burgomaster. Maximilianstrasse, one of the grandest boulevards of the Renaissance, is named for him.In 1761 the Chevalier de Seingalt, better known as Casanova, spent six months carousing and shocking the local burghers as Portugal's delegate to the peace parley that ended the Seven Years' War between Austria and Prussia. He had intended to reside in what is now the Steigenberger Drei Mohren, a splendid Renaissance hostelry, but the French ambassador had already booked the entire establishment for his own entourage. An accommodating banker provided Casanova with a nicely furnished private villa. Alas, neither that house nor the original Drei Mohren survived a 1944 air raid, but the hotel, although a modern postwar shadow of its erstwhile splendor, is still Augsburg's best.

Fifteenyearold Marie Antoinette, on her sojourn from Vienna to Paris in 1770 to marry the French dauphin who was to became Louis XVI, was so enamored with Augsburg and stayed so long that the groom sent a courier with an urgent note asking her to stop dallying. During her visit she inaugurated the magnificent Schaezler Palais on Maximilianstrassea banker's mansion that now houses the Municipal Art Museum, the Baroque Gallery, and the State Galleryby dancing all night in its opulent gilded banquet hall (where candlelit Mozart concerts are now held in the Summer months).

Augsburg lore abounds with such anecdotes, as it does with tales of famous native sons. Among them are the master painters Hans Burgkmair and both Holbeins (Elder and Younger); Elias HolI, Germany's leading Renaissance architect, w.ho created most of the city'S splendid buildings; Mozart s father, Leopold, who got his musical training at St. Salvator Gymnasium and remained an Augsburg citizen all is life despite moving to Salzburg in 1737; Rudolf Diesel, Inventor of the engine that bears his name; Willi Messerschmitt, the aircraft designer and builder; and the playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose sharptongued irreverence and Marx ist proclivities Augsburg citizens did not really forgive until early 1985, when his birth house, at Auf der Rain 7, bought and renovated by the city, was opened as a museum.