Four days in Nuremberg: the empire's favourite city, and the Nazis' too

Come in from the station and start at St Lorenz, the church that faces you as you cross into the old town. Two things inside are worth the visit on their own: Adam Kraft's stone tabernacle, an 18 metre Gothic spire of carved sandstone from the 1490s with the sculptor himself kneeling under one corner of it, and Veit Stoss's Annunciation, a huge carved and painted wreath hanging on ropes above the choir.

Then walk north across the river and up. The lanes climb through the Sebald quarter to the castle, which is not one building but three that spent centuries in a sulky rivalry: the imperial castle at the top, the burgraves' fortress that burned down in 1420, and the city's own towers. The deep well is the odd highlight, 50 metres of shaft in the rock, demonstrated by lowering a candle into the dark; the Sinwell tower is the view.

Come down for dinner. There is a small half-timbered sausage kitchen by the river that has been grilling since 1419 and a much larger one beside St Sebald, and the argument about which is better is a century old and will not be settled tonight.

Tram 8 runs south east to a lake with a colossal brick horseshoe on the far side of it. The congress hall was designed to seat fifty thousand people under a roof that was never built, modelled openly on the Colosseum and left unfinished in 1943, and the documentation centre inside its north wing explains what the rallies were for: the choreography, the film cameras, the trains bringing hundreds of thousands of people a year, and the laws announced here in 1935.

Walk on round the water afterwards. The Zeppelin field is fifteen minutes away, a long stone terrace where Speer staged his columns of searchlights, and you can stand on the tribune where he put Hitler. It is deliberately not restored and the city has argued for years about whether to let it fall down.

In the afternoon take the U-Bahn to the Palace of Justice on the other side of town. Courtroom 600 is where twenty one surviving leaders of the Nazi state were tried between November 1945 and October 1946 by four Allied powers who had to invent the procedure as they went, and where the charge of crimes against humanity was first used. The room is still a working court, so it is closed to visitors when a case is sitting; the exhibition upstairs is open regardless.

Albrecht Duerer bought the tall half-timbered house below the castle in 1509 and worked in it until he died in 1528, and it is one of very few artist's houses of its period anywhere in northern Europe that you can walk through. The printing press in the workshop is demonstrated most days, and it explains more about how he made his living than the paintings do.

The Germanisches Nationalmuseum is the other end of the old town and it is enormous: the national collection of German art and material culture, prehistoric gold to twentieth century design, built around a Carthusian monastery. Do not try to see it all. The medieval sculpture, the historic musical instruments and the Behaim globe, made in 1492 and the oldest surviving globe of the earth, are the things to find.

Outside its door runs the Way of Human Rights, a line of white concrete pillars along a street, each carrying one article of the Universal Declaration in German and in one other language, and one column carries nothing at all. Dani Karavan put it here in 1993, in this city, on purpose.

One last church, and the older of the two. St Sebald was begun in the thirteenth century as a Romanesque basilica and grew a Gothic choir, and in the middle of it stands the shrine of the city's patron saint: a bronze canopy on snails and dolphins, cast over eleven years by Peter Vischer and his sons, with a small self-portrait of the founder in his working apron among the apostles.

The main square is two minutes away if you want a last look at the fountain and the clock on the Frauenkirche, which performs at noon. Then the station is fifteen minutes on foot straight down Koenigstrasse.