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"In all of Germany I never saw a town more beautiful" is how the marauding Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have reacted to
PASSAU
. Tucked away by the Austrian border, 90km downstream from Straubing, it's a place that the tourist brochures hail as the "Bavarian Venice". While that's a piece of hyperbole, the city does have a certain magic, and its character is very much defined by water, standing as it does at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz. For centuries, Passau was the seat of a powerful prince-bishopric, the largest in the Holy Roman Empire, and it was probably for this court that the national epic, the
Nibelungenlied
, was written at the turn of the thirteenth century. Nowadays, it's a bustling town given a youthful edge by a university founded in 1978.
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