Frederick the Great designed his summer retreat with only ten principal rooms, and forbade his queen from ever staying there. Sanssouci — French for "without worries" — was finished in 1747 to sketches the king drew himself, then argued over with his architect, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. The dispute was real. Knobelsdorff wanted a raised basement to lift the building above its terraces; Frederick refused, insisting the palace meet the garden at eye level. The king won. The result is a single-storey rococo pavilion that seems to rest on the hillside rather than command it. Those terraces are the reason the site exists. Six curved vineyard steps cut into the Bornstedt slope, glazed niches set into their retaining walls to trap heat for figs and grapes. Frederick planted them in 1744, before the palace was commissioned. A visitor on a potsdam day tour from berlin encounters the garden first and the architecture second — an order the king intended. Above the vines, 132 steps rise to the entrance terrace and the gilt-crowned dome. What followed spread outward for 150 years. The Hohenzollerns kept building: the Neues Palais in 1769, Charlottenhof in the 1820s, the Orangery Palace under Frederick William IV. Together with the Havel lakes and Peter Joseph Lenné's landscaped parkland, they form the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin, inscribed by UNESCO in 1990 — one of Germany's largest World Heritage sites by area. Potsdam Sanssouci tours today move through roughly 300 hectares of that ensemble. Inside, the rooms reward slow looking. The Marble Hall borrows Rome's Pantheon in miniature, its Carrara columns lit by an oculus. The Concert Room carries Johann August Nahl's gilded stucco — trellises, herons, spiderwebs — pressed across white panelling in a manner that made Sanssouci the reference point for Frederician rococo. The Voltaire Room commemorates a friendship that collapsed in 1753. The library, circular and panelled in cedar, held some 2,100 volumes, all French. Frederick asked to be buried on the top terrace beside his greyhounds. His nephew ignored the request; the body travelled twice more before returning in 1991. Any potsdam day tour from berlin tour ends, in some sense, at that plain slab where visitors still leave potatoes. Prussian landmarks rarely receive a tribute so domestic, and few palaces have kept their founder's argument with an architect quite so visible in the stonework.