Potsdam

Berlin exhausts me in the good way — it is loud, certain of itself, and runs on a fuel I cannot name. After four days of it Lia and I needed a different register, so we took the regional train south-west, twenty-five minutes through the suburbs, and stepped out in Potsdam, which is doing something entirely quieter. It was the seat of the Prussian kings, and the whole town still carries the slightly unreal quality of a place built to impress monarchs who are no longer around to be impressed.

Sanssouci, and a king’s idea of escape

The reason most people come is Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s summer palace, and it earns the visit. The name is French for without cares, and Frederick built it in the 1740s as a single-storey rococo retreat where he could escape the formality of court, play the flute, and argue philosophy with Voltaire, who actually lived here for a while before the two men fell out spectacularly.

What I had not expected was the vineyard. The palace sits at the top of six curved terraces planted with vines and figs behind little glass doors, and the building seems to ride the crest of them like a long yellow boat. We climbed the central stair in low autumn sun with the gardens spreading out below and the whole excessive, charming folly of the thing fully on display. Frederick is buried up here, on the terrace, beside his beloved greyhounds, exactly as he asked to be — a request his successors ignored for two centuries before finally honouring it in 1991.

A Dutch quarter and a town of borrowed worlds

Potsdam has a habit of importing other countries. The Holländisches Viertel, the Dutch Quarter, is a grid of red-brick gabled houses built in the 1730s to attract Dutch craftsmen who, in the end, largely declined to come — leaving a tidy little fragment of Amsterdam stranded in Brandenburg. It is now full of cafés and small shops, and we spent a happy hour there drinking coffee and eating an enormous slice of cake while Lia catalogued, building by building, which house she would buy in her imaginary alternate life.

There is also a Russian colony, Alexandrowka, of log houses built for a Russian military choir, and a mock-Italian church, and a Roman bath that is neither Roman nor a working bath. The cumulative effect is of a town that spent two centuries collecting the world and arranging it neatly around its lakes. It should feel like a theme park. Somehow it does not — it feels, instead, like the long quiet daydream of people with too much money and surprisingly good taste.

We ended the day by the water at the Glienicke Bridge, the so-called Bridge of Spies where East and West once swapped captured agents across the line. Standing in the middle, one foot notionally in each former world, I found the quiet of it more eloquent than any monument.

When to go: late spring and early autumn are ideal — the park gardens are at their best, the crowds at Sanssouci are bearable, and the light on the lakes is long and gold. Avoid midsummer weekends, when half of Berlin has the same idea and the palace queues stretch.