You might be here randomly scrolling this evening or looking for novel facts to impress people over dinner. Or maybe you want to decide whether Frankfurt will be a good home? Well this list won’t help with the latter but I hope you have fun anyway!

1. First settled by the Celts and then the site of a Roman town ‘Nida’ but only named Frankfurt or ‘Ford of the Franks’ around 450 AD after the Franks pushed the Alemanni tribe down south using this river crossing.

2. Modern day Frankfurt is built on top of the Roman town of Nida, which is now buried underneath the U-Bahn station Römerstadt (Roman town!) and the shopping centre Nordwestzentrum. It was named after the river Nidda which flowed past.

3. From 1152 for 200 years, Frankfurt was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and Emperors were elected/crowned at the site now occupied by the city hall, hence the name Römer (the Roman).

4. For 50 years, from 1816, Frankfurt was the capital of Germany and the Paulskirche was seat of the National Diet.

5. Alexander Bell might be credited with patenting the first telephone but one of two possible true inventors of the telephone was Phillipp Reis 20 years earlier in Frankfurt.

6. Capital of nothing. After WW2, Frankfurt was the administrative centre of the West but in voting for a new capital city, narrowly lost out to Bonn (Konrad Adenauer’s favourite). However Frankfurt had already built new parliamentary buildings (currently housing the Hessiche Rundfunk). Thinking that Frankfurt would become the capital, it also forewent the opportunity to be capital of Hessen which fell instead to Wiesbaden.

7. Very little of what you see in old town Frankfurt is original. In fact, the city was so heavily bombed that only one building in the old town remained intact and is still there on the Römer square: Wertheim House

8. Frankfurt has the distinction of being the only city in the world home to 2 central banks: the German Bundesbank and the ECB.

9. The (self given?) and slightly cheesy nickname Mainhatten is not unearned. The top 15 tallest buildings in Germany are now all in Frankfurt. Number 16 being the Post Tower in Bonn. The rest of the top 20 are also in Frankfurt… gotta love towers to love Frankfurt!

10. With 28% of residents holding a foreign passport, Frankfurt is officially the most international city in Germany!