The Romantische Straße was not invented in the Middle Ages. It was drawn on a map in 1950, a tourism corridor stitched together by regional marketers to move American visitors — and their currency — through a Bavaria still clearing rubble. The route runs roughly 350 kilometres from Würzburg to Füssen. Rothenburg ob der Tauber sits near its northern heart. The town's survival is a matter of accident and negotiation. Rothenburg grew wealthy as a Free Imperial City, then collapsed into obscurity after the Thirty Years' War, too poor to modernise. That poverty preserved it. The complete ring of medieval walls, the Plönlein corner, the Gothic-into-Renaissance Rathaus on Marktplatz — all stood because nobody could afford to replace them. In March 1945, Allied bombing destroyed roughly 40 percent of the old town. Reconstruction followed the original plans stone by stone, funded in part by donations that bought individual metres of rampart, each donor's name still lettered along the covered wall-walk. A journey along the romantic road munich to neuschwanstein passes through a place that is both genuinely ancient and carefully rebuilt. At the southern end, Neuschwanstein answers Rothenburg's civic pragmatism with private fantasy. Ludwig II began it in 1869 above the Pöllat Gorge, commissioning a stage designer rather than an architect for the interiors. He slept there fewer than a dozen nights. The Throne Hall was never finished. What was built — the Byzantine apse, the Wagnerian murals, the Singers' Hall modelled on the Wartburg — became the most photographed silhouette in Germany. Between the two lies the argument for the route itself. Dinkelsbühl and Nördlingen, the latter set inside a 14-million-year-old meteorite crater, hold their own walls. Wieskirche, a Rococo pilgrimage church on the Pfaffenwinkel meadow, carries UNESCO listing. Harburg Castle stands above the Wörnitz. Romantic road munich to neuschwanstein tours compress this into a single day; slower travellers take four. Rothenburg's own arithmetic remains blunt. Entry to the town, its streets and its squares costs 0 EUR. The tourist office at Marktplatz 2 keeps 09:00–17:00 hours on weekdays and 10:00–17:00 at weekends. The town charges nothing to be looked at — a rarity among European landmarks, and the reason its cobbles carry two million pairs of feet a year without a turnstile in sight.