The Great Vat in the cellars of Schloss Heidelberg holds 221,726 litres of wine. It has been filled three times. That figure describes the Palatinate court exactly: theatrical, cash-rich, and allergic to restraint. Heidelberg Half Day Trip from Frankfurt tours cover barely 90 kilometres of motorway, yet they cross from a glass banking capital into a sandstone one. The town holds about 160,000 residents, and close to a fifth of them are students. Ruprecht-Karls-Universität was chartered in 1386, the oldest in Germany, and its faculties still sit inside the Altstadt rather than on a campus beyond it. Scholarship here is not a museum exhibit but a working tenancy, which is why the Old Town has never emptied into pure spectacle. The Altstadt is a single long spine. Hauptstraße runs roughly 1.6 kilometres between Bismarckplatz and Karlstor, among the longest pedestrian streets in Europe, and the lanes falling from it reach the Neckar in short, steep intervals. Almost nothing standing predates 1693. French forces sacked the town twice during the Nine Years' War, and what visitors read as medieval is a Baroque reconstruction set on medieval foundations: the same plot lines, new façades, an even cornice height across whole streets. The Heiliggeistkirche, begun in 1398, survived, its sandstone still carrying the merchants' booths cut into the outer walls. The Karl Theodor Bridge, rebuilt in stone in 1788, closes the composition at the water. Above the roofline, the castle refuses to resolve. Lightning took the powder tower in 1537 and struck the rebuilt keep again in 1764, and the counts palatine never restored it after that. The Ottheinrichsbau façade, carved around 1560, remains one of the earliest Renaissance elevations north of the Alps; the Gesprengter Turm still lies split open at the moat. German Romantics adopted the ruin in the early nineteenth century, and Turner painted it repeatedly; that reading of Heidelberg landmarks as picturesque decay is the one most Heidelberg Old Town guided tours still inherit. Behind the town rises the Königstuhl at 568 metres, with the Philosophenweg cut along the opposite slope, where Hölderlin and Eichendorff walked for the view back across the water. A Heidelberg Half Day Trip from Frankfurt tour, at bottom, is an exercise in reading a rebuilt town against the ruin that was left alone.