Potsdam

Potsdam is Prussia dreaming of Italy. Frederick the Great built Sanssouci — "without care" — as a vine-terraced retreat where he could philosophise with Voltaire and play the flute in the round music room; the evening concerts of the philosopher-king, himself a composer of real skill, made the little palace one of music history's addresses, sealed forever in 1747 when old Bach visited, improvised on the king's theme and turned it into the Musical Offering. Around Sanssouci grew a whole UNESCO landscape: the New Palace's baroque bombast, the Orangery, Charlottenhof, gardens by Lenné linking lake to lake — five hundred hectares of composed scenery. The town beneath the palaces collects the world in miniature: the gabled Dutch Quarter, the Russian colony Alexandrowka with its wooden dachas, and Babelsberg — where in 1912 the world's first great film studio opened, birthplace of Metropolis and The Blue Angel, still producing and now teaching in Germany's leading film university. History returned in 1945: at Cecilienhof, the Tudor-style last Hohenzollern palace, Truman, Stalin and Churchill divided the post-war world. Today Brandenburg's capital pairs its palaces with science campuses and a musical season centred on the Nikolaisaal and the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci, which each summer returns baroque opera and chamber music to the very rooms — and gardens — built for them.