Munich is one of those rare cities that seem to come gift-wrapped: there is so much rebuilding and upgrading of the old buildings going on at the moment that many of them are hidden behind scrims and scaffolding.

Once you get behind these  flat temporary facades, the charms of the city quickly become apparent. St Michael’s Church, for example, is hidden away behind a giant life-sized drawing of itself, but its grandeur remains intact – we walked into the middle of organ practice, which revealed the powerful acoustic depth of this ancient place.

Mý wife Rachel and I chose to come to Munich in October to celebrate our tenth wedding  anniversary because 2011 also marked the 125th anniversary of the death of Ludwig II., the king of Bavaria. This was the reason why we found ourselves in St. Michael’s Church, in search of the Wittelsbach family crypt.

In a small but solemn room we found the ornate sarcophagous which remains Ludwig’s last resting place – almost as baroque as some of his famous castles, it showed signs of the affection people still feel for this troubled but brilliant monarch, whom the French poet Paul Verlaine called ‘the last true king of the 19th century’ – or indeed any century, you may think when you consider some of the amazing details of his life: his championing of Richard Wagner, his fascination for the Bourbon line of French kings and his self-professed desire to remain ‘an eternal engima both to myself and others.

The next – and equally important – place to visit after this was Schloss Nymphenburg, where Ludwig II. was born in the queen’s bedchamber on August 25, 1845 : he was named after his grandfather, Ludwig I, whose ‘gallery of beauties’, showing some of the most notable females of the age, occupies another room. The grandson later  created his own ‘gallery of beauties’ – however, this collection was confined only to  portraits of his favourite horses. All of these remarkable exhibits can be foud in the magnificent palace, a gravity-defying mixture of Baroque and Rococo styles, where once again the construction workers are still hard at work.

Looking at yet another fine Munich exterior peeping out from behind a framework of canvas and scrim, it is hard not to wonder at what Ludwig II, famous for dedicating his life to the building of such ambitious castles, would make of all this activity?

Ken and Rachel, London, UK