Schleissheim Palace

Schleissheim Palace in Oberschleissheim near Munich still surprises me with how little known it is outside Bavaria — even though the New Palace was conceived as a genuine Wittelsbach answer to Versailles, complete with a strictly symmetrical Baroque garden whose dead-straight axes seem to run all the way to the horizon.

On a quiet autumn day, with the sun low and the first yellow leaves showing along the avenues, the grounds take on a calm you wouldn’t expect from such courtly ambition. The New Palace’s façade stretches long and severe ahead of you, and the symmetry of the garden’s axes practically forces your eye into the distance, toward the canal that runs through the entire estate.

That contrast is exactly what draws me here as a photographer: Baroque rigor and formal will on one side, the quiet, almost understated everyday feel of a Munich suburb on the other. Few visitors, plenty of light, plenty of room to simply watch — Schleissheim is one of those places you have to deliberately keep free of the usual rush that surrounds the better-known palaces.

Walk once through the avenues of this Baroque garden and you understand why the Wittelsbachs wanted to realize their own claim to courtly splendor here — quieter than Versailles, but no less deliberate.