Sanssouci Palace

The name is the whole design brief: "sans souci," without a care, and Frederick the Great built exactly that — a single-storey retreat on a terraced vineyard hillside outside Potsdam, deliberately smaller and more intimate than the Baroque grandeur of Versailles it's often compared to. Built between 1745 and 1747 with Frederick's own close involvement alongside architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, it's less a statement of power than an escape from one — a place for a king who spent most of his reign at war to be, for stretches at a time, simply a man with a garden. The terraces themselves aren't just ornamental: glazed niches built into the vineyard slope trapped heat so figs and grapes could ripen in Prussia's cold climate, a small agricultural experiment folded into a pleasure garden.

Between 1750 and 1753, Voltaire lived here at Frederick's invitation, drawn into the king's habit of hosting philosophical "table talk" dinners that ran more like salons than state functions. It's one of the more famous literary friendships of the Enlightenment, and one of the more famous fallings-out: the relationship curdled over disputes involving other court intellectuals and Voltaire's own sharp tongue, and he left Potsdam in 1753 having produced, among other things, some scathing private commentary on his royal host that eventually leaked.

Frederick's final instruction about the palace outlived him by two centuries. He wanted to be buried on the terrace, next to the graves of his beloved whippets, rather than in the grand Berlin cathedral crypt where Prussian kings were expected to lie — and his successors ignored him, interring him instead in the garrison church at Potsdam. It wasn't until 1991, after German reunification, that his remains were finally moved to Sanssouci and buried exactly where he'd asked, 205 years after his death.

Getting there

Located in Potsdam. Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) is about 32 km away.