The Tauber Valley is a popular cycling area with two more or less parallel routes. Down here in the valley itself is the “classic” route which is mostly flat, or slightly downhill, except for a few places down near Wertheim where the valley gets narrow so you have to go Read More …
Tauberrettersheim is a town of 839 people in the Tauber Valley just five-and-a-half kilometers upstream from Weikersheim. It is also nearly three kilometers upstream from Schäftersheim and roughly the same distance downhill from Queckbronn. The name Tauberrettersheim means Tauber-Rescuer’s-Home or maybe Tauber-Savior’s-Home, though I have never found any explanation of how Read More …
Those houses in the photo are already in Schäftersheim, so it’s not far from Weikersheim — unless you insist on going by car, in which case you have to turn back and drive around some other way. If you were to turn right at this junction you would immediately come Read More …
The Tauber Valley is served by a single-track non-electrified railway line. Aside from local trains there are Regional Express trains from Aschaffenburg several times a day, and also a few from Würzburg. The end of the line for passenger trains is now Creglingen, 17 kilometers upstream from Weikersheim, though they Read More …
The stage set for Act 1 of Puccini’s La Bohème in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace was dominated by a book with the German title Engel laufen nackt (Angels run naked). This, we learned, was the quite successful first novel by a young author named Rodolfo Martinelli, who in this Read More …
Weikersheim Palace was originally just a routine medieval castle with a moat around it until the 16th century, when Count Wolfgang II of the House of Hohenlohe developed it into an imposing residence for himself and his family. The palace is on the Market Square and is the only large Read More …
The stone building with the pointy roof on the central Market Square (Marktplatz) in Weikersheim is the Tauberländer Dorfmuseum, which is devoted to showing furnishings, equipment and tools that were used by rural people in this area in pre-industrial times. The museum is open on Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons Read More …
Before the opera or during the intermission you can get a glass of champagne or Sekt here and go for a stroll in the garden. This is a formal baroque garden, modeled after the one in Versailles, including an “Orangerie” at the far end. There are over fifty statues of Read More …
In 2009 in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace I saw three performances, with somewhat different casts, of the German opera The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai (1810-1849), based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name. This is a light opera which used to be extremely popular in Germany Read More …
Jeunesses Musicales presented the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in an open-air production in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace on nine evenings in July 2005. These biennial opera productions, in the odd-numbered years, are almost always chosen from the world’s twenty or so most popular operas. La Traviata Read More …