Private Dresden Tours: Baroque Saxony and the Elbe

A baroque city younger than it looks

Dresden was the residence of the Electors of Saxony, and almost everything clients photograph comes from one reign: Augustus the Strong, Elector from 1694 and King of Poland alongside it, who spent Saxony’s silver on buildings, paintings and porcelain. What clients are looking at, however, is largely not the original stone. The raid of 13 February 1945 flattened the centre, the ruins stood through forty years of the GDR, and the reconstruction ran from the 1950s to well past 2000.

Say that plainly to a client and it improves the visit rather than spoiling it. The Frauenkirche was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005 using every original stone that could be identified and placed, and those stones are the dark ones set into a pale facade — a building that documents its own destruction on the outside. It is a better story than an untouched old town, and it has the advantage of being true.

The four buildings

Everything a first visit needs sits inside a ten-minute walk. The Zwinger is the baroque pleasure courtyard, built in the 1710s and 1720s, and it holds the Old Masters Picture Gallery with Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and a Vermeer, alongside the porcelain collection and the cabinet of eighteenth-century scientific instruments. The Semperoper faces it across the Theaterplatz: burned once in the nineteenth century, bombed once in 1945, and reopened in 1985, forty years to the day after the raid.

The Residenzschloss holds the treasury collections. Along its northern side the Fuerstenzug runs about a hundred metres down the Augustusstraße — the procession of Saxon rulers rendered in some twenty-three thousand Meissen tiles, which came through the raid essentially intact. The Frauenkirche closes the eastern end of the walk, with the Bruehlsche Terrasse above the river beside it.

Tickets that cannot be improvised

The Historic Green Vault is the reason many clients come and the hardest thing in the city to arrange. Entry is by timed ticket at a fixed minute, numbers inside are capped, and visitors pass through a dust lock on the way in. Tickets go on sale well ahead and the useful slots go first, so we hold one before anything else in the day is designed. The New Green Vault upstairs is a conventional museum with no such limits and is often the sensible substitute.

Semperoper house tours are the other trap. They run when the stage is free, which depends on the rehearsal and performance schedule and is published only a few weeks out. We can promise the building from the Theaterplatz on any date; we can promise the inside only once the schedule exists. Performance tickets are a separate matter and go months ahead.

Beyond the Altstadt

Clients often assume the whole city looks like the Theaterplatz. It does not, and the parts that do not are worth an hour. Across the Augustus Bridge the Neustadt came through the raid better and keeps the baroque quarter around the Koenigstraße, with the Kunsthofpassage courtyards further out. The Elbe meadows below the terrace are open parkland running right through the middle of Dresden, and a fleet of nineteenth-century paddle steamers still works the river upstream towards Pillnitz.

Out of the city

Meissen is half an hour downstream: the manufactory that produced the first hard-paste porcelain in Europe from 1710, with the Albrechtsburg on the rock above it. Saxon Switzerland is forty minutes upstream, where the Elbe cuts through sandstone towers and the Bastei bridge crosses a gorge high above the river; it is a walk rather than a viewpoint you drive up to, and clients should be told so before the day is sold. Moritzburg, twenty minutes north, is a baroque hunting lodge standing in its own lake, and in winter it houses the Cinderella exhibition half of central Europe grew up with.

Advent, and where Dresden sits on a routing

The Striezelmarkt on the Altmarkt was first recorded in 1434 and is among the oldest Christmas markets in Germany. It is not the only one here: the Stallhof market in the castle courtyard is the medieval one, with further markets at the Frauenkirche and in the Neustadt, which means Dresden carries a full Advent day rather than an hour of it. The Stollenfest, with an enormous stollen paraded through the streets, falls on the Saturday before the second Sunday in Advent, and the city is full that weekend.

Otherwise Dresden sits about two hours from Berlin and a little over two from Prague, which makes it the natural stop on a route almost nobody sells. Two nights holds the city and one excursion comfortably. For Advent, book the hotel in summer.