Füssen is the town closest to Neuschwanstein, the placemat, jigsaw puzzle, screen-saver castle of King Ludwig II. Any tourist within a 100-mile radius of the place - southern Germany, western Austria, northern Italy, eastern Switzerland - is obliged to make a stop. Many tourists cannot return home honorably without a picture of themselves standing before the famous turrets.

For those from Florida, the visit has a kind of hallowed, journey-to-the-source quality, since Ludwig's whipped-cream wonder is believed to have been Walt Disney's inspiration for Cinderella Castle. Want to see the pre-Anaheim cradle of modern Florida's tourism and growth? It's here at the foot of the Bavarian Alps.

The train arrived in Füssen on a warm September morning. My hotel, the Sonne, sat plumply at the foot of a street that had been made pedestrian presumably for the safe passage of tourists. Away from the center, cobblestone lanes curved past gabled houses into burbling squares.

Ancient walls crowned a hill that looked down on a patchwork of brown and russet roofs. Church steeples and abbey towers lorded over the houses in the same way that the mountains lorded over the town. Leaf-strewn paths ran along the chalkboard green waters of the Lech River, past the gardens of windowboxed guesthouses, alongside parks and playing fields, and out into the hilly yonder. The beauty and serenity were all the more impressive for being unexpected.

A young woman in a baggy plaid shirt stood with a backpack outside the train station. She had flaxen hair and a flawless complexion.

''You traveling far?'' I asked.

''Four days,'' she said. ''Hiking in the mountains.''

''You stay in huts?''

''I hope,'' she said, laughing.

A similarly dressed young woman joined us.

''This is my twin sister,'' Reinholde said. The sibling was an accountant, Reinholde a lawyer. ''Though I don't look like one now,'' she said, laughing.

The day before they had visited a village dear to them since childhood. ''Our family would vacation there when we were small,'' Reinholde said. ''Our parents don't speak English, so they didn't like to leave Germany. We saw people we knew when we were little. They're real Bavarians.''

''Yes,'' her sister said, laughing, ''we don't understand them.''

We boarded the same bus, but I got off first. I wished them a good hike, and then took a short one myself, up the winding castle road. Like many famous structures, Neuschwanstein looks better from a distance. The highlight is not the tour inside - the castle is less than 200 years old - but the walk higher up and then the view from Marienbrucke, the narrow suspension bridge that spans a rocky gorge. Here people from around the globe, in a medley of languages, patiently wait for, and sometimes graciously help out with, the taking of photographs. It is a scene repeated at other of the Earth's great attractions, and it is always uplifting, for it shows a commonality, a sense of oneness, that is hard to come by in the everyday world. If only we all could be tourists.

Back in town, after a lunch of sauerkraut teigfladen (small, thick pancakes stuffed with sauerkraut), I went to the museum in the former St. Mang monastery. Mang was the monk who built a prayer house near the Lech in the middle of the eighth century, and he is the patron saint for help against vermin, caterpillars and the larvae of the May bug.

Hanging in St. Anne's Chapel was Bavaria's oldest painting of the Totentanz (Dance of Death). The painting's motto reads, ''Whether we say yes or no, each and every one of us must dance.'' Only one of the death figures in the panels carried a scythe; some had canes, one had a horn, one a lute, and one a sword.

One of the museum's rooms was filled with lutes. Füssen, I read, ''was the cradle of European lute making,'' housing in the 18th century 80 lutemakers out of a population of 1,500 people. Today, I read further, there were three instrument makers in town. I dashed out to find them.

The workshop was above Die Markthalle in a 500-year-old building with candy-cane-striped shutters. Pierre Chaubert, a gentle man with a mustache, led me into a large room hung with curvaceous wooden forms.

Pierre was Swiss and had studied violin making in Mittenwald. In 1982 he had come to Füssen with a friend, a lute maker, and the two had set up shop.

In the old days, he said, instrument makers would go out into the forest and cut their own wood. Today, he buys his, mostly from Bosnia. It takes him about 160 hours to make one violin. He showed me one he was working on, and the tool he used to create the curved indentations on the side of the neck. ''It's a little bit like sculpting,'' he said. ''Of course it's not as difficult as sculpting a face, but it's interesting.''

''It's a beautiful instrument,'' I said.

''It's an instrument that has a power that surprises.''

He seemed to have an enviable life - making with his hands, in a time-honored fashion, objects that contributed to the world's happiness. And he did it in a beautiful, tucked-away town.

''I think of Füssen,'' he said, smiling, ''as the center of Europe.''