Schorndorf's Altstadt is a compact grid of half-timbered houses, narrow lanes, and a central Marktplatz that survived the twentieth century largely intact. The market square is framed by well-preserved buildings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with a fountain at its centre and the town hall on one side.
The houses are in the Swabian Fachwerk style — dark timber frames, white plasterwork, steeply pitched roofs — and the scale is human: you can walk from one end of the Altstadt to the other in ten minutes. The Burgschloss, the moated castle that houses the Stadtmuseum, anchors the eastern end of the old town. The streets between the Marktplatz and the Daimler birth house reward slow wandering.