Schlossgarten Schwetzingen

The garden was laid out from 1752 around the Palatine electors' summer residence at Schwetzingen and joins a strict French parterre to an English landscape park; since 1952 the grounds and their surroundings have been protected as a landscape area of some 190 hectares. Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten Baden-Württemberg keeps them and charges admission. The court theatre inside the grounds, opened in June 1753 with Holzbauer's Il figlio delle selve, carries the Schwetzingen Festival each spring, while the lawns take productions staged out of doors in summer — Bizet's Carmen among them.