The covered bridge
Fifteenth-century timber over the river — Nuremberg's signature corner.
Schlaier — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Uoaei1 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Aarp65 — CC BY-SA 3.0 · LBM1948 — CC BY-SA 4.0
His trade made him socially unclean: barred from taverns and company, his children marrying only into other executioners' families — yet his salary was excellent and his house among the finest. The hanging house is that whole paradox: an outcast in a small palace.
If it is open as you pass, its quarter hour earns itself: the diary alone — an executioner honestly logging forty years — can be met nowhere else. If shut, bridge and story fully suffice.
It is the perfect midpoint: main market and town hall to the bridge (five minutes), then across the river island to the Germanisches and the railway museum — the finest walking arc in all Nuremberg.
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A covered wooden bridge crosses the Pegnitz to a stone tower and a half-timbered house hanging over the water — Nuremberg's most photographed corner, with its strangest story: here lived the city's executioner for centuries, isolated above the river because his trade made him untouchable — never greeted, never neighboured — yet indispensable to old justice. The house holds a small museum on the city's most famous hangman, Franz Schmidt, who kept a unique diary recording forty years of his work — an astonishing document of a terrible profession written in its holder's own hand, presented without sensationalism. The whole water passage — the covered bridge, the neighbouring Chain Bridge, the little river island — is the old town's loveliest short walk, free at every hour.
Fifteenth-century timber over the river — Nuremberg's signature corner.
Forty years in Franz Schmidt's own hand — a document without equal.
Boardwalks, an islet and the Chain Bridge — the old town's finest short stroll.
Trödelmarkt 2, 90402 Nuremberg