Frederick the Great drew the first floor plan himself, on a sheet dated 13 January 1745, and insisted the palace remain a single storey so he could step from his bedchamber straight onto the grass. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff refined the drawing and lost an argument over the base; the king wanted no podium between his rooms and his vineyard. Completed in 1747, Sanssouci held ten rooms and no throne. It was named in French — sans souci, without a care — and functioned as a summer retreat rather than a seat of government. A Potsdam Tour From Berlin With Guided Sanssouci Palace Visit still approaches along that intended axis. The six terraces below the palace were farmed as well as admired. Their curved bays were glazed to shelter figs and vines through a Brandenburg climate that discouraged both, and the great fountain at their foot ran badly for a century until steam machinery finally solved it. Frederick was buried on the upper terrace in 1991, beside his greyhounds, two centuries after he asked to be; the wish had been ignored by his successors and by the twentieth century's borders alike. Inside, Knobelsdorff's Frederician rococo runs shallow and bright: gilded reeds, spider-web plaster, a Marble Hall lit through an oculus, a circular library panelled in cedar. Voltaire's guest room carries carved parrots and monkeys, added after the friendship soured. Beyond the palace, Park Sanssouci extends across roughly 290 hectares to the Bildergalerie of 1755–1764 — the oldest surviving purpose-built princely gallery in Germany — the Chinese House, the Orangery Palace, and the vast Neues Palais of 1763–1769, built to prove Prussia solvent after the Seven Years' War. Potsdam Tour From Berlin With Guided Sanssouci Palace Visit tours read this ground as one composition rather than a sequence of separate monuments. UNESCO inscribed the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin in 1990, and the ensemble remains the largest World Heritage site in Germany. That scale explains the shape of guided Potsdam palace tours and Sanssouci skip-the-line entry today: the interiors are small, fragile, and admitted in timed groups from the Maulbeerallee gate. Potsdam Tour From Berlin With Guided Sanssouci Palace Visit tickets, at 14 EUR for a single adult including guided tour or audio guide, admit a small group into rooms built for one man's solitude.