The Marienplatz view
The town hall and Frauenkirche straight ahead.
Municher call it the Alter Peter, Old Peter, and it is the oldest parish church in the city — older than the city itself. Monks were settled on this rise before Munich was formally founded in 1158, and they gave the place its name, which means by the monks. The core of the present building is thirteenth-century Gothic, but centuries of alteration have laid baroque and rococo over it, so the interior is gilded and colourful inside a Gothic frame. The tower is the real reason for the queue. It stands about ninety-one metres, with a viewing gallery at fifty-six metres reached by three hundred and six narrow stone steps and no lift. The charge is five euros and the reward is the best view in central Munich: you look straight down on Marienplatz and the ornate tower of the New Town Hall, across to the two domes of the Frauenkirche, and on clear days out to the line of the Alps on the southern horizon. The church below is free, and holds one detail visitors remember for a long time: the complete skeleton of Saint Munditia in a glass case in a side chapel, dressed in jewels with glass eyes in its sockets, one of the catacomb relics brought north from Rome in the eighteenth century. The tower is not for anyone short of breath or uneasy in tight spaces — the stair is narrow and carries traffic in both directions at once.
The town hall and Frauenkirche straight ahead.
A jewelled skeleton in a glass case.
Rindermarkt 1, 80331 Munich
From Alter Peter you look at the New Town Hall itself, which is the best thing in the view — and the one thing you cannot see if you go up it. But the climb here is three hundred and six steps on foot, while the town hall tower has a lift and costs a little more. The practical rule: if your knees are fine, Alter Peter is clearly better; with small children or older travellers, take the lift.
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