Dresden travel guide
Renowned for its extravagant love of the arts and with its great monuments lovingly rebuilt after wartime devastation, Dresden once more deserves its title of 'Florence on the Elbe'.
Demoted by the Communists to a mere district town, princely Dresden is once more the capital of Saxony. While the city will never quite recover the allure it had before the Allied air raids of February 1945, the reconstruction of its great historic buildings, such as the Frauenkirche and the Semperoper, has restored its famous skyline and its unparalleled artistic heritage draws visitors from all over the world.
Places to visit in Dresden
The baroque beauty of Zwinger Palace
Perhaps the most stunning group of baroque buildings in Germany, the Zwinger is arranged around a spacious courtyard with lawns, pools and fountains. It was built from 1709 onwards by Augustus’s architect Pöppelmann to house the spendthrift monarch’s collections and to be an appropriate setting for ostentatious pageants and festivities. The collections include the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters’ Gallery), which houses some of the world’s finest paintings including Raphael’s emblematic Sistine Madonna; the fabulous Porzellansammlung (Porcelain Collection) and the Rüstkammer (Armoury); and the antique scientific instruments of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon (Mathematical-Physical Sciences Saloon).
Frauenkirche - symbol of Dresden's resilience
Symbolising Dresden’s recovery from the horrors of war is the glorious domed Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), for decades a ruin, then rebuilt stone by numbered stone from 1994 onwards, and finally reconsecrated in late 2005. The gilded cross atop the dome was donated by Britain’s ‘Dresden Trust’. The area around the Frauenkirche is scheduled to be rebuilt along traditional lines, respecting the old, irregular street pattern.
The imposing Semperoper
Standing next to the Zwinger in the grandly proportioned Theaterplatz, the Semperoper (opera house, 1870–8) was designed and built by Gottfried Semper in the Italian high baroque style on the site of an earlier theatre which, prior to burning down, had staged the premieres of Richard Wagner’s operas, Rienzi (1842), The Flying Dutchman (1845) and Tannhäuser (1845). In 1905 and 1908 respectively, the premieres of Salome and Elektra by Richard Strauss were performed in the new building. In front stand the equestrian statue of King Johann and the memorial to the composer Carl Maria von Weber, who was the musical director in Dresden from 1817 to 1826. The building, which was destroyed by bombs in 1945, re-opened in 1985 with a production of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz.
An array of museums at Dresden Castle
The restoration of the Castle (Residenzschloss, 1547), which was totally destroyed during World War II, was begun in the 1960s and is due to be completed in 2013. The four-winged Renaissance building now acts as the cultural centrepiece of this great Saxon city. First to return to its original home was the Collection of Prints, Drawings and Photography. The spectacular Green Vault, which followed suit, is stacked full of the treasures of the Saxon princes – precious stones, jewellery, ivory, pearls, corals, crystal and more. From here the Langer Gang (Long Passage) leads to the Johanneum I, the erstwhile royal stables on the Neumarkt, which now houses the Verkehrsmuseum (Transport Museum). Along the wall of the passage, 35 Wettin rulers are depicted in a royal parade. In 1876, the mural was rendered in scratchwork, but in 1906 this was overlaid by 24,000 ceramic tiles from Meissen.
Discover more...
• To explore another city that has regenerated since World War II, try Berlin
• If you are interested in grand German palaces, try Potsdam
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