Frederick the Great designed his summer palace with only ten principal rooms, and refused to let it rise above a single storey. Sanssouci was built between 1745 and 1747 on a south-facing hillside outside Potsdam, its name a French phrase meaning "without worry." The king wanted a vineyard house, not a residence of state. He sketched the concept himself; Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff executed it, and the two quarrelled over the elevation. Frederick won. The palace sits low against its six terraced vine steps, close enough to the garden that he could walk out of the Marble Hall and into the fruit trees. That proximity is the point. Most Prussian architecture of the period asserted distance between monarch and ground. Sanssouci collapses it. The terraces, glazed in the eighteenth century to ripen figs and grapes in Brandenburg's cool climate, function as both agriculture and approach. Visitors on a potsdam walking tour from berlin encounter the building from below, through 132 steps that force a slow ascent — the sequence Frederick intended. The wider park grew around this modest core. The Neues Palais, finished in 1769, answers Sanssouci with 200 rooms and deliberate excess, built to prove Prussia's treasury had survived the Seven Years' War. Between them stand the Chinese House, the Orangery Palace, the Roman Baths and the Bildergalerie, Germany's oldest surviving purpose-built royal picture gallery, hung with Rubens, Caravaggio and van Dyck. UNESCO inscribed the ensemble in 1990 as the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin, the largest World Heritage site in Germany by number of listed structures. Inside the palace, the Rococo is restrained by German standards. Johann August Nahl's carving in the Concert Room turns gilded reeds and spiderwebs into wall surface. Frederick's library is circular, panelled in cedar, and held classical texts in French translation — he wrote no German if he could avoid it. Voltaire stayed here for nearly three years before the friendship curdled. The king's grave lies on the top terrace, beside his greyhounds, where he asked to be buried in 1786 and where his body finally arrived in 1991. Sanssouci matters now because it records a specific eighteenth-century argument about what power should look like: small, literate, agricultural, French-speaking. Guided potsdam walking tour from berlin tours reach it in under an hour by regional rail, and the contrast with the capital's monumental core is the lesson. The Stadtschloss, the Dutch Quarter and the Cecilienhof all sit within the same city, layering Prussian, Dutch and Cold War histories across a few square kilometres.