It is the castle of a thousand postcards, a hundred films, a million dreams. Rising white and turreted from a wooded crag high in the Bavarian Alps, its slender towers

Many of the castles in this series are fairy tales, romantic fantasies built or rebuilt in the nineteenth century to look the way we imagine castles should look. The Imperial

Every so often a castle does more than witness history; it makes it. Pembroke, standing on a great rock almost surrounded by a tidal river in the far south-west of

There are cities where the castle is a museum you visit and then leave behind, a stop between lunch and the train. Prague is not one of them. Here the

Come around a bend of the Moselle in western Germany and you will meet one of the most perfect castle views in the country. High on a cone of vine-covered

High in the mountains of Abruzzo, in the wild and beautiful heart of central Italy, stands one of the most spectacular castles in the whole country. Rocca Calascio is a

Assisi is a city of peace. It is the birthplace of Saint Francis, the gentle friar who preached to the birds and embraced poverty, and pilgrims come from all over

Almost everyone who comes to this corner of Bavaria comes to see Neuschwanstein, the impossibly famous fairy-tale castle on its crag. But there is a second castle in the valley

On the edge of a sheer cliff in southern Germany, so close to the drop that it seems to grow out of the rock itself, stands a slender white castle

Deep in the wooded hills of the Spessart, in a hidden valley far from any main road, there is a castle so perfectly pretty and so perfectly placed that it