Ingolstadt
— — a river city that kept its walls.
Not only on a wall.
“A Bavarian city on a bend of the Danube, with a brick gothic minster, a white Baroque palace, and a ring of medieval gate-towers still standing. The old town is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes. The river runs cold and green past the bastions. North of the city, the new car factories hum quietly through the night. from the studio
Ingolstadt, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ingolstadt sits on the Danube in Upper Bavaria, roughly 80 kilometres north of Munich at an elevation of 374 metres. First documented as Ingoldes stat in 806, it became a fortified Bavarian residence and, in 1472, the seat of the first Bavarian state university, where Adam Weishaupt later founded the Illuminati in 1776. The city is also where Mary Shelley placed Victor Frankenstein's medical studies in the 1818 novel. Today its population is about 140,000, anchored by the headquarters of Audi AG, which moved here from Zwickau in 1949.
The Liebfrauenmünster, a late-gothic brick hall church begun in 1425 under Duke Ludwig VII, is the largest of its kind in Bavaria and the spiritual centre of the old town. Two streets away stands the Neues Schloss, a white late-gothic palace built for the dukes between 1418 and 1432, now housing the Bavarian Army Museum. The Kreuztor — the city's surviving western gate from 1385 — is the silhouette most often used as the city's emblem. Together the brick gothic and the palace whites give the old town its two-tone signature.
The old town is compact and walkable, ringed by a green belt that follows the line of the former fortifications. The Audi Forum north of the centre offers factory tours of the production lines in German and English by reservation. Late spring through early autumn is the easy season, with Volksfest beer-tent weeks in May and August-September drawing local crowds. Ingolstadt Hauptbahnhof sits on the Munich-Nuremberg main line, with regional trains under an hour from Munich Hbf and the Munich airport reachable in about 70 minutes by car.