Baden-Baden: the spa town of European high society

Frequented in the nineteenth century by Russian tsars and European aristocrats, Baden-Baden remains one of Germany's most elegant spa towns.

The spa center, a destination for European high society since the nineteenth century, is comfortably explored on foot.

The Friedrichsbad Thermal Baths, opened in 1877, still offer a Roman-Irish thermal route in neoclassical settings practically unchanged since their construction.

A short walk away, the Kurhaus, a neoclassical casino and event hall, hosted in the nineteenth century Dostoevsky, who lost much of his fortune at the gaming tables, among lavishly decorated rooms.

Continuing, you walk along the Lichtentaler Allee, a tree-lined avenue of nearly three kilometers along the Oos River, designed as a public park in the nineteenth century.

Toward evening, the Russian quarter of the city, with its own golden-domed Orthodox church, recalls how frequented the place was by the Tsarist aristocracy before the 1917 revolution.

Fyodor Dostoevsky spent difficult periods in Baden-Baden precisely due to his gambling addiction, an experience that directly inspired his novella 'The Gambler.'

The presence of such a large aristocratic Russian community in the nineteenth century led to the construction of one of the most elegant Orthodox churches outside Russia, still active today.