The Baroque Schloss Belvedere, in the city of Weimar, Germany

 "Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. — Yuval Noah Harari

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(in the federal state of Thuringia, Germany) The city of Weimar is found in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east. Weimar was a focal point of the German Enlightenment and home of the leading figures of the literary genre of Weimar Classicism, writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In the 19th century, noted composers such as Franz Liszt made Weimar a music center. Later, artists and architects such as Henry van de Velde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Walter Gropius came to the city and founded the Bauhaus movement, the most important German design school of the interwar period. You’ll see them memorialized on the streets, in museums and in reverently preserved houses across town. The political history of 20th-century Weimar, however, was quite volatile. It was the place where Germany's first democratic constitution was signed after the First World War, giving its name to the Weimar Republic period of German politics (between 1918 and 1933) Weimar is also the place where, post-WWI, the constitution of the German Reich, known by historians as the Weimar Republic (was drafted, though there are strangely few reminders of this historical moment. (Nearby, the unadorned, unaltered remains of the Buchenwald concentration camp provide sobering testament to the crimes of the subsequent Nazi regime.) In summer, Weimar’s many parks and gardens lend themselves to quiet contemplation of all this intellectual and cultural gravity (or alternatively, allow you to take a break from it). Featured here is Schloss Belvedere, a Palace in Weimar that is set amid Belvedere Park's lovely 43 hectares (~106 acres), this early-18th-century gem was once the hunting lodge of Duke Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Outside, the formal gardens and orangery have been carefully restored; inside there's an 18th-century craft museum displaying glass, porcelain, faience (glazed ceramic ware) and furniture in gorgeously decorated apartments. on the outskirts of Weimar, it was really a pleasure-house (Lustschloss) built for house-parties, between 1724-and 1732, to designs of Johann August Richter and Gottfried Heinrich Krohne for Ernst August ("the Duke").