Nymphenburg Palace

Nymphenburg is Munich's grand exhale: the summer palace of the Wittelsbach dynasty on the city's western edge, begun in 1664 as an Italian villa to celebrate an heir and stretched by five generations into a baroque façade that outreaches Versailles — 632 metres of it, mirrored in a canal where swans conduct themselves like landowners. This is where Bavaria's rulers came to breathe, and the palace still works that way: half the pleasure is architectural, half is the 200-hectare park behind it, and Münchners treat both as their back garden.

Inside, the Great Hall (Steinerner Saal) is the showstopper — a three-storey rococo ballroom by the Zimmermann brothers, frescoed with Olympian gods in permanent summer, preserved exactly as finished in 1758. The palace's most famous room is subtler: King Ludwig I's Gallery of Beauties, 36 portraits of the most beautiful women of his Munich, commissioned democratically from duchess to shoemaker's daughter (including Lola Montez, the dancer who cost him his throne — the gallery doubles as a confession). In the south wing, the bedchamber where Ludwig II was born in 1845 opens the mad-king story that Neuschwanstein finishes. The Marstallmuseum coach house below holds the dynasty's carriages, including Ludwig II's gilded night-sleighs — rococo spaceships built for moonlit Alpine rides.

The park hides the real connoisseur material: four garden pavilions, of which Amalienburg — a small pink hunting lodge with a silver-and-blue Hall of Mirrors that out-dazzles the main palace — is routinely called the finest rococo room in Europe. Give the whole ensemble a half day: palace and Marstallmuseum, then the long walk past the cascades to the Badenburg lake. Tram 17 runs from the Hauptbahnhof to the gates in fifteen minutes; the entry-plus-tour products bundle the carriage museum and pavilions, and from spring to autumn the Hubertussaal hosts candlelit classical concerts — the palace after dark, which is how it was designed to be seen. Combine with nearby Hirschgarten (Munich's largest beer garden) and the day rounds off exactly as Bavaria intends.