A Baroque skyline on a bend of the Elbe

Seen from the north bank of the Elbe, Dresden still matches the view Bernardo Bellotto painted in 1748: the dome of the Frauenkirche, the tower of the court church, the long terrace above the river. Much of it is a reconstruction. The old town burned in February 1945, and the patient rebuilding that followed, completed in the case of the Frauenkirche only in 2005, is part of what visitors come to see.

The collections are the other part. Augustus the Strong and his successors bought paintings, porcelain and jewels on a grand scale, and their treasures now fill the Zwinger and the Residenzschloss, a few minutes’ walk from each other. Evenings belong to the Semperoper or to the Neustadt across the Augustus Bridge, a district of nineteenth-century tenements, courtyards and small bars that came through the war largely intact.

The river sets the pace. Meadows run along both banks right through the city, paddle steamers leave from below Brühl’s Terrace for Pillnitz Palace, and the S-Bahn follows the valley upstream to the sandstone rocks of Saxon Switzerland in well under an hour. In December the Striezelmarkt, first held in 1434, fills the Altmarkt, and bakeries sell Dresden Christstollen by the kilo.