Zons am Rhein

In 1372, the Archbishop of Cologne moved his Rhine River toll collection upstream to Zons, because nothing says ‘pay up’ quite like a fortified town with basalt walls and corner towers. For centuries, every merchant ship navigating Europe’s busiest trade route had to stop and settle accounts at this compact rectangular fortress. Today, the 600-year-old toll castle houses the Kreismuseum, home to the world’s largest accessible collection of Jugendstil pewter, where Art Nouveau tin objects and textile wall hangings occupy the same medieval chambers that once stored toll ledgers and coins.

The toll station’s original job was extracting money from people who had nowhere else to go, and it did that job well enough to justify basalt walls thick enough to survive six centuries of continued use. What replaced the coin counting is, in its own way, just as specific an obsession: over 1,600 pieces of ornamental Art Nouveau pewter, cast into flowers and beetles and the occasional 77-centimeter vase, collected piece by piece starting in 1979 until Zons quietly became the place serious collectors of Jugendstil tin send their calls. The merchants who once queued here to pay their river tolls would probably find it a strange inheritance. The fortress spent its working life taxing cargo, and now spends its retirement guarding decorative flatware.