Gärtnergehilfenhaus
The Gärtnergehilfenhaus stands in Sanssouci Park in Potsdam, one building within the Roman Baths ensemble. It went up in 1832 in the Italian country villa style that was fashionable at the time. Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned the group as a tribute to the Italy he longed for.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his student Ludwig Persius shaped the whole ensemble between 1829 and 1840. Pergolas, arcades and garden spaces tie the Roman Baths, a small tea pavilion and the house into one composition. The baths never served their name: they exist as a romantic scene drawn from Schinkel's own travels in Italy.
Beside the buildings lies the machine pond, an artificial lake that Peter Joseph Lenné worked into his landscape design. Its early keeper was a steam engine, a sign of how the same century raised Roman daydreams and new machines at once. You can cover both, Italian villas and steam engineering, in one short stroll.
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The myTuur app is free, and once you are standing at a spot its story starts by itself.
Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Potsdam. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.
What is myTuur?
myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.