Rothenburg ob der Tauber was bankrupted into beauty. After the Thirty Years' War and a plague that halved its population, the free imperial city could no longer afford to rebuild, expand, or modernise. It simply stopped. The medieval street plan, the complete circuit of town walls, the gatehouses and the merchant houses on Herrngasse survived because nobody had the money to replace them. The town sits above the Tauber valley at the meeting point of two old trade arteries, and it is that position that later placed it on the Romantische Straße, the tourist route drawn up in 1950 to link Würzburg with Füssen. A romantic road day tour from munich follows roughly the same corridor. Rothenburg's town charter dates to 1274; the Rathaus pairs a Gothic tower of 1250 with a Renaissance front added after the fire of 1501, and the two halves still refuse to agree with one another. The Jakobskirche holds Tilman Riemenschneider's Heilig-Blut-Altar, carved between 1501 and 1504 in limewood and left unpainted — a deliberate choice that let the grain and the shadow do the modelling. Below it, the Plönlein, the Siebersturm and the Kobolzeller Tor form the wedge of streetscape reproduced on more postcards than any other corner in Franconia. Much of what visitors see was rebuilt. On 31 March 1945 Allied bombing destroyed roughly forty percent of the old town, including a long stretch of the eastern wall. Reconstruction ran for decades, funded in part by donors worldwide whose names are cut into the stones of the rampart walkway — an unusually literal record of who paid for the past to be put back. Free entry to the town means the walls, the market square and the lanes cost nothing; individual museums and towers charge fees. That mixture of authenticity and careful repair is why Rothenburg anchors most romantic road day tour from munich tours and why the Franconian medieval towns still draw scholars alongside sightseers. Operators pair the town with Neuschwanstein and Linderhof on separate itineraries, so a romantic road day tour from munich remains the option for travellers who want the walled town rather than the castles.