Trier

The great Roman city gate, raised around 170 AD from huge sandstone blocks laid without mortar and darkened by weather to the near-black that gave it its name. It survived because an eleventh-century Greek hermit, Simeon, walled himself inside it as an anchorite and was entombed there, after which it was turned into a church. The best-preserved Roman gate north of the Alps, looming like a blackened fortress.

Best shot The north face at dawn, raking light on the black stone.

• Touristy

An arena cut into the hillside around 100 AD for eighteen thousand, where gladiators fought and the condemned were thrown to the beasts. Under the sand floor survives the vaulted cellar, the substructure where caged animals, stage machinery and prisoners waiting to die were held before being hoisted up into the light. You can go down into it.

Best shot The underground cellar beneath the arena floor.

• Solo-friendly

One of the largest bath complexes of the Roman Empire, begun in the fourth century, never finished as baths and later built into the city walls as a fortress. Above ground the towering brick apses; below, a warren of vaulted service tunnels the slaves moved through unseen, which you can walk. Bare, echoing and strikingly eerie.

Best shot The underground service passages, or the ruined apses at golden hour.

• Solo-friendly

The oldest cathedral in Germany, its core Roman masonry laid in the fourth century under Constantine, seventeen hundred years of use behind a heavy, fortress-like Romanesque front. In a chapel behind the choir it guards the Holy Robe, the seamless tunic said to have been Christ’s, shown only during rare pilgrimages. Dim, ancient and cavernous, full of archbishops’ tombs.

Best shot The Roman-brick west front and towers from the Domfreihof.

• Touristy

A Benedictine abbey church holding the tomb of the Apostle Matthias, said to be the only apostle’s grave in Germany and north of the Alps, his relics rediscovered here in 1127 to a sensation. In the crypt lie Eucharius and Valerius, the first bishops of Trier. Still a working pilgrimage, the apostle’s stone sarcophagus its focus.

Best shot The crypt with the bishops’ tombs, the apostle’s sarcophagus in the nave.

• Quiet

Built between 1235 and 1260, one of the two oldest Gothic churches in Germany, its floor laid out as a twelve-petalled rose for the Virgin. French masters from Champagne gave it soaring early-Gothic vaults, a west portal crowded with carved figures and columns painted with the apostles. Small, tall and dim, a stone flower turned in on itself.

Best shot The sculpted west portal up close, or the rose-plan vaulting overhead.

• Quiet

An exuberant Baroque church finished in 1753, its interior by Balthasar Neumann, standing on a fourth-century burial ground of Christian martyrs. Below it the crypt holds the tomb of St. Paulinus and the relics of the Theban Legion, an entire Roman legion said to have been massacred for refusing to give up their faith, their martyrdom painted in lurid detail on the ceiling over the bones.

Best shot The crypt with the martyrs’ relics, the martyrdom fresco filling the nave ceiling.

• Quiet

A boutique hotel in a listed half-timbered house of 1567 on twelfth-century walls, its tavern pouring since 1803, the oldest in town, and its dining vault once part of the cathedral’s eleventh-century fortifications. Sixteen individual rooms over the ancient foundations, some facing the cathedral. Old Trier to the bone.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A small historic hotel of eleven rooms in an ornate old building facing the Porta Nigra head-on, a figure of St Christopher on its front, some rooms giving a close-up view of the black gate. A regional Mosel restaurant below. Sleep across the square from two thousand years of Roman stone.

• Adults only

A privately run hotel in a white Jugendstil villa of 1914, built as a wine merchant’s home, its Art Nouveau detail intact throughout, on the slope above the old town with the city spread below. In the same family since 1978, an individual period mansion.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A carefully restored old building on the western edge of the city, characterful rooms with exposed beams and French windows onto private terraces, a restaurant strong on Mosel cooking and a serious wine list. Warm and traditional, a little out from the centre.

• Adults only

A charitable wine estate whose cellar is reputed to be the oldest in Germany, built around 330 AD under Constantine and given a monastic vault in the seventh century, still storing wine. It opens for guided tastings, including candlelit ones among the barrels in the ancient stone. Drink Riesling where the Romans laid the walls.

Best shot The candlelit Roman-era vaults among the wine barrels.

• Adults only

The tasting room of a grand Mosel wine estate, in the historic vaulted cellars under an eighteenth-century palace beside the cathedral, moody stone rooms on much older foundations, a garden terrace facing the Dom. Mosel Rieslings and seasonal plates. Closes for a winter break, so check.

• Adults only

A wine tavern on the main market square built, unknowingly, on top of an ancient Roman cellar found during renovation, now displaying one of the largest private collections of Roman finds and serving candlelit dinners cooked from Roman recipes out of the old cookbook De re coquinaria. Above ground, plain German fare and Mosel wine. Below, eat like an emperor.

• Adults only

The traditional wine house of the Becker estate out in the wine village of Olewig, pale woodwork opening into a brick vaulted cellar that comes into its own in the cold months, seasonal cooking with the family’s own Mosel wines. A Michelin plate, and a proper cellar.

• Adults only

A dense antiques-and-curiosities shop tucked between the cathedral and the Roman basilica, dealing in Roman coins, antique jewellery and silver, porcelain and cut glass, sacred and devotional objects, paintings and sculpture and baroque-to-Jugendstil furniture. The relic-and-oddity mix, in the middle of the ancient city, is exactly right.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A cramped, cosy antiquarian bookshop opened in 1992 right beside the cathedral, old and rare books, prints and graphics, known for antique maps of the Mosel and a deep trove of Trier postcards going back to 1898. A dim, book-stacked room for a bookish wander.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A curated vintage and secondhand boutique in the centre, open since 2022, hand-picked eighties to two-thousands stock, vintage band tees, leather jackets, old denim and secondhand designer. The band-shirt end of an alternative wardrobe.

• Solo-friendly