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Few German cities carry their history as visibly as Potsdam. Spread across a landscape of lakes, canals, and gentle woodland at the southwestern edge of Brandenburg, it served for centuries as the residence of Prussian kings and later German emperors, and the ambition of that era is still written across every hill and waterfront. The result is a city where the built environment feels almost implausibly grand for a place of its size, and where a single afternoon's walk can take you from a Dutch-influenced quarter of gabled townhouses to a Russian colony of log-built Orthodox homes to the terraced vineyards climbing towards the most celebrated palace in the German-speaking world.

Sanssouci is the obvious anchor. Frederick the Great commissioned the rococo summer palace in the 1740s, and the name, meaning without care in French, captures something of the philosophical ease he wanted the place to project. The park that surrounds it is a Unesco World Heritage site, and rightly so: it extends across several hundred hectares and contains not just the main palace but the Orangery, the Chinese House, the New Palace, and a dozen other structures, each with its own character. Visitors who arrive expecting a single building are routinely surprised by the scale of what unfolds once they pass through the park gates.