If this is an illness, it’s getting worse.

At least I’m not alone. Those still sleeping on Munich’s resurgence were awakened with a jolt when the influential cosmopolitan magazine Monocle last summer named Munich the best city to live in the entire world, much less in Germany. Its historic advantages both as a home base or a vacation destination are ample.

In all the simple things that make a place livable, Munich excels. It is clean. The public transportation system is exceptionally efficient. There is the traditional cuisine, German comfort food, which unlike Saf im Zerwirk, is usually of the heavy and highly carnivorous variety, with pork and dumplings as staples. But there are also challenging restaurants like Essneun and G-Munich forging ahead with culinary innovations.

G-Munich is the kind of place that reminds you how far restaurants have come in seizing the ground once held by theater for live performance and staging. Entering you see candles hovering over each table, appearing to be suspended in midair like something out of Hogwarts. (Spoiler: they are set on glass discs, which are, in fact, strung on slender lines from the ceiling.)

The selection of breads, delivered in labeled paper bags, comes with a carousel of three salts and three olive oils, eyedroppers provided for the precision deployment of the olive oil, including one pressed on the premises, according to the waiter. From the tandoori tuna tartar to the curry ice cream there are surprises, including the friendliness and helpfulness of the people serving the food, a rarity in the kind of expensive establishment that usually delights in the diners’ awe and helplessness.

The oldest of old saws is that Catholic Munich is the northernmost Italian city. But such saws age well for a reason. There is truth in them. Locals will wax endlessly poetic about the flattering southern light, but when it strikes the city’s Baroque and Rococo architecture, or its stunning parks, I start to realize that they may have a point. A visit to Schloss Nymphenburg, summer palace of the rulers of Bavaria, manages to combine both, a favored place for tourists and locals alike to stroll.

Munich eschews Berlin’s “poor but sexy” mantra. Fur-clad ladies of leisure still climb out of prowling Ferraris and into the grand dame of the city’s hotels, the Bayerischer Hof, during the old-fashioned ball season.

Yet across town in the younger Glockenbachviertel, a night crawler can drain cocktails at the hip, Portuguese-themed bar Maroto and sing away the final hours of the evening at the glorious German dive Fraunhofer Schoppenstube, a 10-euro cab ride from the Bayerischer Hof and a world away.