On a low hill above Darmstadt, at the very end of the nineteenth century, the young Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse decided to gather artists and let them build a new way of living. The Mathildenhöhe became an artists' colony from 1899, and its buildings are some of the best Jugendstil, the German Art Nouveau, anywhere. UNESCO listed the ensemble in 2021. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed most of the first generation, including the exhibition hall and the tall Wedding Tower, with its fingers of brick at the top, finished in 1908 as a gift for the Grand Duke's marriage.
Walking the hill is a pleasure. A grove of plane trees shades the square, the Lily Basin glitters with tiles, and the Russian Chapel, with its golden onion domes, stands a little apart, built for the Tsar's family, who had links to the Hessian court. Peter Behrens, later the architect of industrial Berlin and a teacher of Le Corbusier and Mies, built his own house here in 1901, a statement of modern design. Details are everywhere: carved doorways, mosaic panels, flowing ironwork and exuberant gables.
Darmstadt is a city of around 140,000 people, with fuel, cafés and workshops at every turn, so supplies are easy. Parking for a motorbike on the hill is simple outside busy weekends, and a walk through the plane trees is a nice change from the saddle. The city itself is known as a science town, with a large technical university and the European Space Operations Centre, which gives it an energetic, youthful feel.
The riding around is superb. The Odenwald, a gentle, forested range to the east, offers smooth roads with long bends through beech and oak woods, and the Bergstrasse, along the western foot of the hills, is known for its early spring blossom and wine villages. Both are busy on sunny weekends, so go midweek if you can. A visit to Worms, with its medieval synagogue and cathedral, makes an excellent companion trip. Autumn light on the brick of the Wedding Tower is hard to beat.