Schleissheim Palace

Gravel crunches under your feet. Ahead, a long pale façade stretches across the flat Bavarian plain, so long that you have to turn your head to take it all in. Behind you, the traffic of Munich has faded. Here there is only wind moving through clipped hedges, the call of a crow, and the soft sound of water somewhere in the gardens. Welcome to Schleissheim, just north of the city, where one Bavarian ruler tried to build a home fit for an emperor.

Schleissheim is not one palace but three. The oldest sits closest to the village. The grandest, the New Palace, is the long building in front of you. And far away, at the very end of the gardens, a small pavilion called Lustheim waits on its own. Together they form one of the largest Baroque ensembles in southern Germany. The word Baroque, by the way, describes the dramatic, richly decorated style that ruled European art and architecture in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The story begins quietly. In the late sixteenth century, Duke Wilhelm the Fifth of Bavaria wanted a retreat from court life. He chose this flat, open land and built a modest country house with a farm and small chapels. It was a place for prayer and rest, not for show. His son, Maximilian the First, later enlarged it into a proper residence. That building, rebuilt after damage in the Second World War, is what we now call the Old Palace.

Then came Max Emanuel. He became Elector of Bavaria as a young man, and he had enormous ambition. An Elector was one of the princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor... and Max Emanuel hoped to rise even higher. He fought against the Ottoman Turks in the 1680s, including at the relief of Vienna and the capture of Belgrade. Soldiers called him the Blue Elector, after the colour of his uniform. Fame on the battlefield gave him dreams of a crown.

His first great project here was Lustheim, the small garden palace at the far end of the grounds. It was built in the 1680s, around the time of his marriage to Maria Antonia, a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. The architect was Enrico Zuccalli, an Italian-Swiss master working for the Bavarian court. Lustheim was meant for pleasure — hunting parties, music, summer evenings. Today it holds a large collection of early Meissen porcelain, the first true porcelain made in Europe.

Around 1701, Max Emanuel began the New Palace. Zuccalli again drew the plans. The scale was enormous, because the Elector believed his family might soon gain an imperial title. Then history turned against him. In the War of the Spanish Succession, Max Emanuel sided with France. After a heavy defeat at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, he lost control of Bavaria and spent years in exile. Work here stopped. The half-built palace stood waiting.

When Max Emanuel returned in the 1710s, his dreams were smaller but still grand. A new court architect, Joseph Effner, took over and finished the building. Look at the main façade now. Its length is the first surprise. Some visitors expect a compact château; instead they find a palace built for a much larger destiny that never came. The original plan was even bigger. What you see is, in a sense, a reduced version of a dream.

Inside, the drama moves upward. A grand staircase rises beneath a painted ceiling, framed by white stucco — a fine plaster that craftsmen shaped by hand into shells, garlands and figures. The stucco artist Johann Baptist Zimmermann worked here, and painters including Cosmas Damian Asam and Jacopo Amigoni filled the ceilings with colour. The great halls celebrate Max Emanuel's victories. Look up, and you will see battles, gods and allegories, all telling one story: this man deserved glory.

Here is a second surprise. Today the New Palace is also an art gallery. The Bavarian State Painting Collections show European Baroque paintings in the state rooms. So you can stand in a room built for a seventeenth-century prince and look at canvases from the same era, hung where courtiers once waited for an audience. The paintings and the walls belong to one world. Few galleries let you see art in such a close match with its setting.

Now step outside again and look along the central axis. The gardens are one of the few large Baroque gardens in Germany that keep their original layout. The designer Dominique Girard, a Frenchman trained in the style of Versailles, shaped much of what you see. A long canal runs away from the palace. Straight paths, low hedges and open lawns lead the eye toward Lustheim in the distance. Nothing here is wild. Every line was planned.

Water was central to the design. Near the palace, a cascade carries water down in steps toward the canal. The canals here were also part of a wider network that linked Schleissheim with other Bavarian residences, including Nymphenburg on the western side of Munich. Courtiers could, in theory, travel by water between palaces. Today the canals are quiet. Ducks move across the surface, and the reflections of trees shake whenever the wind rises.

Schleissheim has one more layer that many visitors miss. Just beside the palace grounds lies one of the oldest airfields in Germany, opened in the early twentieth century. Part of it now belongs to the Deutsches Museum, Munich's famous science and technology museum, as an aviation branch with historic aircraft and hangars. So on some days, you may hear the hum of a small plane above a garden designed for horses, carriages and candlelit evenings. Two very different ages share the same open sky.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment on the central path. Look back toward the long façade, and then forward toward Lustheim, small and far away. Between them lies the whole story of one man's ambition — the hope, the defeat, the return. Listen to the gravel, the water and the wind across the flat land. As you walk on, notice how the straight lines of the garden still guide your steps... exactly as their designers intended, three centuries ago.