St. Michael's Church
The barrel vault overhead spans more than 20 meters freely — surpassed in width only by St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
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Duke William V demolished 87 houses to build this Counter-Reformation centerpiece between 1583 and 1597, then restarted on a grander scale after the tower collapsed in 1590. The largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, it set the template for Southern German early Baroque architecture for generations.
What to look for
- The barrel vault: more than 20 meters wide, modeled on Il Gesù in Rome, second only to St. Peter's in span
- The facade's bronze standing statues of Duke Wilhelm and earlier Wittelsbach rulers, arranged in the form of a family tree
- The quire and transept added by Friedrich Sustris after the original collapsed with the tower in 1590
The church is 78.2 m long and 28.2 m high — enter and look up at the vault before moving toward the quire.
St. Michael's Church is one of 37 sights worth the detour in Munich, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Munich pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Munich
- Allianz ArenaThe world's first stadium with a full color-changing exterior — 75,000 seats wrapped in inflated ETFE plastic panels that can change color across the entire facade.
- Deutsches Museum125,000 objects across 50 fields of science and technology — all on a former coal island in the Isar.
- Nymphenburg PalaceAt 632 metres across, this Baroque summer palace is wider than Versailles — and it started as a birth announcement.
- Alte PinakothekThe gallery that taught Europe how to build a museum — then filled it with five centuries of Old Masters.
- FrauenkircheThe twin towers top out at just over 98 meters — Munich caps the entire city at 99 m, so nothing can overtake them on the skyline.
- Englischer GartenA Massachusetts-born American Loyalist, fleeing Britain after the Revolution, drew up plans for what became one of the world's largest urban parks.