Lübeck

Lübeck's Holstentor has guarded the Trave since 1478, its twin brick towers leaning toward each other because the marshy ground beneath them settled unevenly centuries ago and nobody's ever levelled it. This is Hansestadt Lübeck - Hanseatic City, still its official title - the island capital that once summoned merchants from two hundred towns to argue over salt, cloth and Baltic trade routes.

Yet the same walled island that built an empire on herring and white gold salt also quietly produced three Nobel laureates from a population of barely 220,000, and Thomas Mann set his own family's slow unravelling here in Buddenbrooks. Most visitors manage an afternoon: a photo at the leaning gate, a box of Niederegger marzipan, back on the train by dinner.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours linger longer - tracing the fishbone tangle of the Altstadt to the devil statue outside St. Mary's Church, tricked, legend goes, into helping build it, then on to the Buddenbrookhaus where Mann's fiction and Lübeck's history blur together.

Put your earbuds in. Let the towers lean. Let Lübeck talk.