Schwetzingen would be a large town with a medium-sized reputation if it were not for the palace garden, which is one of the great surviving Baroque landscape gardens in Europe. Elector Carl Theodor of the Palatinate made it his summer residence in the eighteenth century and spent decades improving it, adding a theatre, a pavilion shaped like a Turkish mosque, a fake Roman aqueduct, a temple to Apollo and long avenues of clipped trees that run out into the Rhine plain. The mosque has no function except to look foreign, and it has been doing so for over two hundred years.
The court's cultural ambitions are part of the story. In 1763, the seven-year-old Mozart played at the palace on a European tour with his family, and the small rococo theatre in the palace still hosts opera, notably in the spring festival. Today the town is also known as the asparagus capital of Germany. Between April and the end of June, the surrounding fields are covered with the plastic-covered ridges where white asparagus grows, and every restaurant offers the stalks with ham, butter, boiled potatoes and a little hollandaise. A local asparagus queen is crowned each year, and the season ends on St John's Day.
Schwetzingen is on the Bertha Benz Memorial Route, which follows the historic first long-distance drive in a motor car. In August 1888, Bertha Benz took her husband's three-wheeled Patent Motor Car from Mannheim to Pforzheim, without his knowledge, with her two teenage sons, to prove it could travel. She is credited with the first long-distance journey by car, and she needed all her resourcefulness along the way. The route is signposted by brown signs showing a small car, and Schwetzingen is on the way south.
For riders, the route here is flat and straightforward, through the Rhine plain, with long avenues of old trees, small towns and fields of tobacco and asparagus. The roads are good and mostly quiet outside commuter hours, and the speed limits matter. It is easy riding, and the bends are few, so the pleasure comes from the history and the light. A handful of side roads through villages offer a more relaxed pace.
Schwetzingen has everything: fuel, supermarkets, bakeries and traditional inns, and the whole town is a good place for a pause. The palace garden has a modest entrance fee, and a café inside. In April the cherry trees bloom, and in autumn the garden is a patchwork of gold.