Nymphenburg Palace

This palace exists because of a baby. When the long-awaited heir Max Emanuel was born in 1662, Elector Ferdinand Maria was so overjoyed that he commissioned an entire summer residence as a celebration. His wife, the Italian-born Henriette Adelaide of Savoy, chose the architect — Agostino Barelli, who also designed Munich's Theatinerkirche — and the result was a Baroque palazzo that grew over the next century into one of the grandest palace complexes in Europe.

The Steinerner Saal — the Stone Hall — occupies three full floors of the central pavilion and hits you with a ceiling fresco by Johann Baptist Zimmermann that practically levitates. But the room most visitors come for is King Ludwig I's Gallery of Beauties: 36 portraits of the women he considered the most attractive in Munich, painted by Joseph Stieler between 1827 and 1850. The collection includes a dancer, a shoemaker's daughter, and Ludwig's notorious mistress Lola Montez, whose affair with the king contributed to his forced abdication during the 1848 revolution. Ludwig's taste was democratic; his judgement was questionable.

The park surrounding the palace covers 200 hectares and has been redesigned three times — first as an Italian garden in 1671, then remodelled in the French style by a pupil of Versailles' Le Nôtre, and finally reworked into an English landscape garden in the early 1800s by Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, the same landscape architect behind the Englischer Garten. A central canal stretches from the palace westward to a marble cascade decorated with Greek and Roman gods.

King Ludwig II was born here on August 25, 1845. The room where Bavaria's most famous eccentric first drew breath is part of the palace tour — an oddly intimate detail in a building of such formal grandeur. The palace also houses the Marstallmuseum, one of Europe's finest collections of royal carriages and sleighs, including the fantastical gilded coaches Ludwig II used for his midnight rides through the Bavarian countryside.