From Paris
to Berlin

Land at Charles de Gaulle and transfer to the Hôtel Plaza Athénée on Avenue Montaigne — a palace hotel in the most exclusive few hundred metres in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower over the rooftops.

The evening walks the grand boulevards: the Champs-Élysées down from the Arc de Triomphe, then the Place de la Concorde — the largest square in the city, with its Egyptian obelisk and the tower framed beyond it.

Through the Tuileries, the formal garden that runs from the Concorde to the Louvre and where Parisians actually sit. Dinner is a classic brasserie: escargots, steak frites, or coq au vin.

The Eiffel Tower, then the Louvre with a private guide — the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, and the palace the museum was built inside.

The afternoon takes in the Palais Royal, the Île de la Cité where the city began, and Notre-Dame, whose Gothic engineering has held for over 850 years. Then the Tuileries, where Parisians sit rather than sightsee.

The evening is a private dinner cruise on the Seine, past everything you saw by day with the lights on and the monuments doubled in the water.

Montmartre first: Sacré-Cœur and the view from its steps, then the cobbled streets past the studios and cafés of Picasso, Modigliani and Van Gogh, and the Place du Tertre with its painters.

The afternoon is a private culinary walk: croissants and baguette; Camembert to aged Comté; French wine by region; crêpes; artisan chocolate; and the pastry counter — éclairs, mille-feuilles and macarons.

The evening is free for the Champs-Élysées or the Rue Saint-Honoré.

A TGV from the Gare de l’Est to Strasbourg, under two hours, and a complete change of register. Strasbourg is the right hinge for this journey because its identity is genuinely both French and German, and has been for centuries.

Check in at Maison Rouge in the centre, then explore. Petite France is the picture-postcard quarter, half-timbered houses leaning over canals; the cathedral is a Gothic masterpiece, and worth the climb for the view over the city and out to the Black Forest.

Place Kléber is the main square, and the Covered Bridges once formed part of the fortifications. The UNESCO-listed Grande Île is the historic heart. Dinner is Alsatian: flammekueche, choucroute, bretzels, Munster, and crisp local white wine.

A direct train from Strasbourg to Munich, three and a half to four hours, through the Black Forest and into Bavaria.

Check in at the Bayerischer Hof, a grand hotel that behaves more like a small city — restaurants, bars, a private cinema and its own theatre — and which has been run by the same family for four generations since 1897.

The afternoon is Munich: Marienplatz and the Neues Rathaus with its Glockenspiel; the twin-towered Frauenkirche; the Viktualienmarkt; and the Residenz, the former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs and one of the great city palaces of Europe. Dinner is Bavarian — pretzels, weißwurst, schnitzel and the beer that made the city famous.

A private day into the Bavarian countryside to Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig II’s romantic vision of medieval knighthood set against the Alps — and the castle that Disney borrowed for Sleeping Beauty.

Skip-the-line tickets include a guided tour of the interiors, which are considerably stranger and more theatrical than the exterior suggests. The walk up from the ticket office is about 1.5 kilometres and steep; the Marienbrücke, a bridge over the gorge, gives the view everyone knows.

Then Hohenschwangau, where Ludwig spent his childhood, and the Alpine villages and lakes around it. Back to Munich in the evening.

A high-speed ICE north, roughly four hours from Bavaria to the capital.

Check in at the Adlon Kempinski, directly on Unter den Linden beside the Brandenburg Gate — which is about as central as an address in Berlin gets.

The afternoon covers the essentials: the Brandenburg Gate; the Reichstag with Norman Foster’s glass dome; Unter den Linden itself; Museum Island, a UNESCO site holding five world-class museums; the Berlin Cathedral; and Alexanderplatz.

A day given to the twentieth century. The Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse preserves a section of wall, the death strip behind it, and a memorial to those who died trying to cross. The East Side Gallery is the longest remaining stretch, now covered in murals.

The afternoon takes in Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing between East and West; the Topography of Terror, built on the site of the Gestapo headquarters; and the Holocaust Memorial, a field of 2,711 concrete stelae that has to be walked into to be understood.

Dinner in a traditional Berlin restaurant.

The morning is the royal and the rebuilt: Charlottenburg Palace, the largest in Berlin, built for Sophie Charlotte, the first Queen of Prussia; then Kurfürstendamm, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, deliberately left broken as a reminder.

The afternoon is a food walk through the city’s genuinely multicultural scene: currywurst, pretzels, döner — which Berlin has made its own — potato dishes, German cakes and local beer.

A farewell dinner closes the journey.

Breakfast at the Adlon and, if the flight allows, a final walk to the Brandenburg Gate. Private transfer to Berlin Brandenburg Airport.