Celle, Germany

CELLE is just half an hour from Hannover but the distance in atmosphere is centuries. While the bombs rained on the state capital, this small town emerged unscathed, a charming miniature of the seventeenth-century townscape lost in Hannover. As one of the finest half-timbered towns in Germany, Celle gets more than its share of tourists; indeed it's worth an overnight visit just to enjoy it free of day-trippers. However, it remains – just – more market town than museum piece. It also positively hums with quiet prosperity, and for that some thanks must go to the dukes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Banished from Lüneburg, the nobles crossed to the other side of the Lüneburg Heide in 1378 and made Celle an aristocratic Residenzstadt for nearly three centuries, encouraging the prosperity that built its streetscape. Celle is a testament that feudalism starts as a street plan: the ducal Schloss lies at the western edge of the Altstadt, whose parallel streets east run up towards it, a gesture of submission to the ducal yoke.