Neuschwanstein
Ludwig II’s fairy-tale castle on a crag in the Alps is a Romantic dream of the Middle Ages, built with 19th-century technology. The exterior is Romanesque and Gothic, but inside there is electricity, running water and central heating. The castle became the model for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.
Ludwig II of Bavaria was an admirer of Richard Wagner and of the medieval world of legend. In 1869 he began building a castle that was to be a stage set for his dreams, and the first sketches were made by a theatre designer, Christian Jank, before the architects took over. The castle was built on a crag above his father’s castle, Hohenschwangau.
The king managed to live there for only a few months before he was declared insane and unfit to rule in 1886 and died in unclear circumstances the same year. The castle was never finished; only around fifteen of the planned rooms were fitted out. A few weeks after his death it was opened to visitors, and today it receives more than a million people a year. Neuschwanstein is the Romantic side of historicism: not an accurate reconstruction of the Middle Ages, but an image of them.