Four days in Dresden: a baroque capital put back together from numbered stones

Start in the square with the church. George Bahr built it between 1726 and 1743 with a stone dome that people said would never stand, and it stood for two centuries, through the raids themselves, before collapsing on the morning of 15 February 1945 from the heat below. The pile of rubble stayed where it fell until 1993. The rebuilt church opened in 2005, its golden cross made in London by the son of a bomber crew member, and the old blackened stones were set back into the new wall in the positions they were found.

Inside it is pale, bright and much more theatrical than a Protestant church usually is, with galleries stacked in tiers around it. Climb the dome for a view of the whole old town and out along the river.

Then walk the terrace, five hundred metres of raised promenade above the Elbe that Goethe called the balcony of Europe, and follow the palace wall round to the Fuerstenzug: a procession of thirty five Saxon rulers on horseback, a hundred metres long, made from Meissen tiles at the start of the twentieth century and almost undamaged in the war.

The Zwinger is a party building. Augustus the Strong had it put up between 1710 and 1728 as an orangery and a setting for court festivals, with a crown-shaped gate, a bath house of nymphs by Permoser, and galleries around a courtyard the size of a parade ground. The courtyard is free and open, and worth a slow lap before you go inside anything.

The picture gallery on the north side is one of the great European collections. Raphael's Sistine Madonna hangs at the end of a long room, and the two cherubs leaning on the frame at the bottom, which have been printed on everything from postcards to wrapping paper, are a small part of a very large painting. There is also Giorgione's sleeping Venus, a room of Cranachs and a Vermeer whose hidden cupid was uncovered in a restoration a few years ago.

In the afternoon cross to the opera house. Semper built it twice, the second time after his own building burned down in 1869, and the version standing today is a post-war reconstruction that reopened in 1985, forty years to the day after the bombing, with the same opera that had been playing when it closed. The daytime tours run when there is no rehearsal and are worth booking.

The Residenzschloss burned out completely in 1945 apart from one set of vaulted rooms in the basement, and putting it back took most of the years since reunification. Inside are the armoury and the Turkish chamber, three tents and a wall of parade weapons collected by rulers who had a real interest in the Ottoman world and a taste for showing off.

The Historic Green Vault is the reason to book ahead. It is the treasury as Augustus the Strong arranged it in 1733, room by room in ivory, silver, amber and jewels, restored to the original layout with no glass cases, so the objects sit in the mirrored rooms they were designed for. It holds about three thousand pieces, including a golden court of the Great Mogul containing over a hundred enamelled figures. Part of the collection was stolen in a burglary in 2019 and most of it has since been recovered.

In the afternoon cross the Augustus bridge into the Neustadt, which is a different city: not rebuilt, not baroque, and covered in paint. The Kunsthof passages are a run of themed courtyards off Alaunstrasse, one of them hung with metal funnels and gutters that turn the wall into an instrument when it rains.

Finish at the far end of the terrace. The Albertinum was the arsenal before it was a museum and it now holds the nineteenth and twentieth century paintings: Caspar David Friedrich, who taught and worked in this city, along with Van Gogh, Degas, the German expressionists and a room of Gerhard Richter, who was born here.

It is a calmer museum than the Zwinger and two hours is plenty. The Hauptbahnhof is fifteen minutes away on tram 3 or a twenty minute walk through the old town.