The onion dome, that Bavarian staple, may well have started here. Johannes Holl built the Klosterkirche of Maria Stern between 1574 and 1576, and its tower is one of the first of its kind, if not the very first. Bavaria took to the idea with enthusiasm, and never looked back.

The church belongs to a Franciscan convent that two Augsburg women founded in 1258, and whose residents became known as the “Sternfrauen,” or star women. Secularization shut it in 1803, though the nuns were allowed to stay until death. King Ludwig I revived it 15 years later on one condition: they would teach the city’s girls. A school bearing their name still operates.

VoiceMap’s Venice of Augsburg audio tour pauses in the square linking Johannes’s church with the town hall his son Elias designed, then follows the convent wall along the canal, explaining how the sisters survived secularization.