Potsdam Highlights Audio Guide and Self Guided Tour

Frederick the Great's colossal New Palace faces two matching baroque palaces built for his kitchens and servants, the Communs. Since 1991 they have housed the University of Potsdam, so students now take lectures in a king's service wing.

Frederick the Great's colossal New Palace faces two matching baroque palaces built for his kitchens and servants, the Communs. Since 1991 they have housed the University of Potsdam, so students now take lectures in a king's service wing.

A small open rotunda of eight Corinthian columns that Frederick the Great raised in memory of his beloved sister Wilhelmine of Bayreuth. Inside sits her marble statue, surrounded by medallions of the great friendships of antiquity.

A gilded rococo tea pavilion in the shape of a clover leaf, ringed by life sized golden figures sipping tea and making music. Frederick the Great's dream of China, built by people who had never been there.

Frederick the Great's carefree summer palace, a butter yellow Rococo jewel perched atop six curving vineyard terraces. Often called the Prussian answer to Versailles, it was built not for power, but for peace and quiet.

Potsdam's own triumphal arch, raised by Frederick the Great to crown his victory in the Seven Years' War. Two rival architects gave it two utterly different faces, and it predates its far more famous Berlin cousin by roughly twenty years.

A fairy tale city gate crowned by two round battlemented towers, guarding the northern edge of Potsdam's old town. It is the earliest example of English Gothic Revival architecture anywhere on the European continent.

A picture-perfect enclave of red-brick, gabled houses that feels like a slice of Amsterdam transplanted into Brandenburg. It is the largest ensemble of Dutch-style architecture anywhere outside the Netherlands.

A monumental green dome crowning the Alter Markt, this is Potsdam's grandest Protestant church and a masterpiece of German Classicism. Its silhouette defines the city skyline for miles around.

Behind its stately baroque facade, this faithfully reconstructed palace on the Alter Markt hides one of Europe's finest collections of Impressionist art, with more paintings by Monet than anywhere outside Paris.

A golden Atlas balances the world atop this Palladian palace of a town hall, the crown jewel of Potsdam's Alter Markt.

A rambling English-style Tudor manor set among the lakes of the New Garden, and the room where the Big Three carved up the postwar world in 1945.

The steel bridge where East and West traded captured spies in the dead of night. Its green truss still carries the memory of a divided world.