The Summer Residenz (Schloss Nymphenburg)

Member Name: MykReeve

Product:	Schloss Nymphenburg
Date:	12/02/02 (1099 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautiful location and grounds, Sumptuous interiors (both in the main palace and the pavilions), Not over-priced, Open on Mondays

Disadvantages: Not much else to do in the area for tourists

Every once in a while you stumble across something unexpectedly beautiful. Even when the guidebooks liberally use words like "picturesque" and "amazing", and even if they provide photographs, sometimes the actual appearance of a place can take you by surprise. Visiting Schloss Nymphenburg was like that for me, and was an unexpected highlight of my visit to the city of Munich.

The area of Bavaria around Munich has more than its fair share of castles and palaces, thanks to the Wittelsbach rulers' preference for elaborate and ostentatious dwellings. Some, such as the "fairy-tale" Schloss Neuschwanstein, you expect to impress, but others are unexpectedly impressive.

Building work on Schloss Nymphenburg began in 1664, as a villa for Karl Ferdinand's wife, Electress Adelaide of Savoy. The palace and its grounds expanded until 1758, and the site became the royal family's summer residence. Today, both the palace and grounds are open to the public.

LOCATION AND GETTING THERE

Schloss Nymphenburg is located to the west of the city. The easiest way to get there from the centre of Munich is by tram or bus. Both tram number 17 and bus number 41 head west along Arnulfstrasse to Romanplatz, where they head north onto Notburgastrasse. If you watch from the left hand side of the bus, you'll see Schloss Nymphenburg a few minutes later, at the end of the long tree-lined canal. Get off at the next stop!

The nearest U-Bahn station is Rotkreuzplatz (on U1 and U7) and the nearest S-Bahn station is Laim (three stops west along any of the S-Bahn lines from the Hauptbahnhof). However, both of these stations are about half an hour's walk from the palace. You'd be better taking the bus or tram. Really.

APPROACHING THE PALACE

From Notburgastrasse, as you look west along the tree-lined canal Nymphenburg, you get your first glimpse of Schloss Nymphenburg. When I visited Munich in Ja
nuary 2002, the canal was frozen, and children were skating up and down it. The snow-covered gardens in front of the palace made it look like something from 'Doctor Zhivago'. It was a really beautiful sight, the sort of thing that you'd see on a Christmas card.

Like most Prussian palaces, Nymphenburg is very broad, but not very deep. In fact, if you looked at the palace from the air, it would look something like a square bracket "[", with the open side pointing to the east. So, as you approach the palace along either side of the canal, the palace appears to open up in front of you, stretching out to the north and south.

At the western end of the canal, in front of the palace, are a series of huge tiered pools. The lowest of the tiered pools is the largest, and was frozen over when I visited the palace. Strips of the frozen pool had been polished, and wooden stakes had been driven into each end of the polished ice strips, so that locals could play a local variant of curling on the ice. Instead of curling stones, they slide objects resembling a Frisbee with a joystick stuck on top across the polished ice strips. Near the pool was a shed hiring skates and the Bavarian curling "stones", alongside a wooden stair down onto the canal, so you could kill a few hours on the ice.

The other tiered pools in front of Schloss Nymphenburg were labelled with signs warning that the ice wasn't thick enough to skate on safely, and sections of ice had been cleared for the palace's swans to swim on. "Mad" King Ludwig II, the best known of the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria, was born in Nymphenburg, and used to feed the swans here. In winter, the fountains and statues in front of the palace are kept covered up in wooden crates.

THE PALACE

Just to the north and south of the central part of the façade of the palace are a series of gates leading to the grounds of the palace. At the centre of the pa
lace, on the eastern side, is the entrance to the shop, and the palace itself. You first have to visit the shop, to buy your tickets, the entrance to which is at ground level.

The Nymphenburg shop stocks more guidebooks, in more languages, than you could ever possibly need, as well as a selection of the usual souvenirs (pens, pads, paperweights, and so on). I heartily recommend the excellent guidebook produced by the Bavarian Administration of State Castles and Palaces,

A ticket for admission to all the parts of Schloss Nymphenburg will cost you 6,50 Euros (about £4), an admission ticket to the palace along will cost 3,50 Euros (about £2.20).

The main entrance to the palace is up the external staircase on the eastern side of the palace. The first room that you enter is undoubtedly the most stunning of the rooms in the palace which are open to the public - the Stone Hall (Steinerner Saal), a vast, two-storey dining hall, which spans the width of the palace. It's a very bright room, with its huge walls covered in frescoes framed in gilt Rococo swirls of stucco. The room is lit by enormous windows on both sides of the palace, with vast chandeliers dangling from the ceiling high above. The most impressive feature of the room, however, is the beautifully-painted ceiling of the Olympian gods.

The north wing of the palace is less interesting than the south, with rooms decorated for Electors Max Emanuel and Karl Theodor. Probably the most amusing of the sights is in the Karl Theodor room - which boasts portraits of the man himself, and both his first and second wives. Looking at the portraits, it is perhaps easy to guess what turned Karl's eye from Elizabeth Auguste to the considerably younger and more svelte Maria Leopoldine.

The north gallery is also worthy of note, with large veduta paintings of Max Emanuel's palaces, including Nymphenburg and Starnberg Castle.

The south wing of the palace boasts several
impressive rooms. Passing through the sumptuous apartments of the electors' wives, and through the south gallery, which is decorated with more large veduta paintings of electoral palaces, you enter the South Pavilion. The highlight of the South Pavilion is, for most, the Queen's Former Dining Room, which now holds Ludwig I's Gallery of Beauties - a collection of paintings commissioned by the King, reflecting King Ludwig's idea of beauty. These are extremely impressive paintings, made all the more interesting by the fact that this collection of pictures have been arrayed without consideration of their subjects' social rank - a painting of a royal princess hangs alongside another of a cobbler's daughter. There are thirty-six such portraits crammed into the room, and each is as beautiful as the next - Ludwig's eye for beauty was seemingly far more in touch with modern aesthetics than his peers' tastes.

The same room also holds some remarkably well-preserved photographs of the Wittelsbach family, and their friends. There are several photographs of King Ludwig II and, one of the best-known recipients of his patronage, composer Richard Wagner.

The bedroom in the South Pavilion was where King Ludwig II was born in 1845. All of the rooms in the South Pavilion, other than the Former Dining Room, have been maintained with their original furniture, and the bedroom contains a couple of small busts of Ludwig II and Prince Otto as young boys.

THE PARK

The park to the west of Schloss Nymphenburg is absolutely enormous, and could easily take a whole day to explore fully. It contains several smaller royal residences, all of which are open to the public. Unfortunately, we arrived at Nymphenburg quite late in the day, and had time to visit only one of these pavilions - the Amalienburg hunting lodge. If you bought the 6,50 Euros admission ticket, it will cover you for entry to all of the small pavilions - otherwise, y
ou have to pay a separate admission fee of 1,50 Euros for each.

The park is divided from west to east by the continuation of the canal. The Pagodenburg and Badenburg pavilions, are located to the north and south of the canal respectively, and are each about a kilometre from the main palace. The Magdalenklause is about half a kilometre from the palace, in the north side of the park, and the Amalienburg is a similar distance away, to the south.

Looking through the guidebook, all of the pavilions are sumptuously decorated - the Pagodenburg boasts a beautiful red-lacquer Chinese Cabinet Room, the Badenburg has a huge banqueting hall and a Baroque bath, and the Magdalenklause has a beautiful little Grotto Chapel covered with tiny shells. However, the Amalienburg lodge appealed the most to me of the park's pavilions, with its gorgeous Hall of Mirrors.

The grounds of Schloss Nymphenburg are very impressive even in winter. Although, when I visited, the ground was covered with snow, the sheer scale of the gardens was impressive. All of the statues and fountains were encased in wooden crates, as those in front of the palace. The wooded areas were beautiful, with small streams running through them, and winding paths that must be wonderful to walk through in the summer.

AMALIENBURG HUNTING LODGE

The Amalienburg hunting lodge was built by Elector Karl Albrecht for his wife Maria Amalia. Visitors enter through the dog and gun room, where hunting supplies were kept, with a line of kennels at ground level around the outside of the room. It's a relatively plain room, with its plain yellow and blue painted walls, certainly in comparison with the other rooms of Amalienburg.

As I mentioned above, the highlight of Amalienburg, if not Nymphenburg itself, is the stunning Hall of Mirrors - a circular room at the centre of the pavilion, with windows on the west and east sides, doors to the north and south, and mirrors on the rema
ining walls. The mirrors are surrounded in spectacularly ornate silver-coloured stucco work, with only occasional gaps allowing you to see through to the pastel blue coloured wall beneath. Around the edge of the ceiling are arranged beautiful silver plaster figures and animals, looking down on the rooms' occupants. It's an absolutely stunning room - the sort of room that one imagines Austen heroines standing in, clutching love letters to their breasts, and spinning while their heart soars.

More in keeping with the pavilion's role as a hunting lodge, is the Hunting Room, next to the Hall of Mirrors. While it is similarly extravagantly decorated, the Hunting Room is essentially a picture gallery of court hunts held by the electoral couple. It's another beautiful room, its walls are straw yellow in colour, where you can see past the silver-coloured stucco that is used to form frames around the paintings.

The kitchen of the Amalienburg is well worth a look too, its walls decorated with beautifully painted blue-and-white Dutch tiles showing Chinese scenes and flower vases.

OTHER THINGS

In addition to the above, there are several glasshouses open to the public in the park, as well as a Museum of Mankind and Nature (closed when I visited), and a museum dedicated to painter Erwin von Kreibig.

To the north-east of the main palace is Nymphenburg porcelain factory which was built in the 18th century, and is still in operation. It has a salesroom.

DETAILS

You can take photographs in the palace and pavilions of Schloss Nymphenburg, so long as you don't use flash. (So, that'll be the 400 speed film then).

The palace of Nymphenburg is open every day of the week, so if you're here for a long weekend, it might be a good idea to come here on the Monday when most of the city's other attractions will be closed. The palace is open from 9am to 6pm in Summer, staying open until 8pm on T
hursdays. In winter, the palace is only open from 10am to 4pm, though people skate on the canal and play Bavarian curling in front of the palace until it's too dark to keep going.

The same opening hours apply to the pavilions within the park.

CONCLUSIONS

There is easily enough to do on the grounds of Schloss Nymphenburg to take up a whole day. If you're only in Munich for a few days, however, you might not want to spend that long here. My recommendation, if you're on a tight schedule, is just to visit the main palace and the beautiful Amalienburg, which will take about three hours (not including the time to travel out to Nymphenburg from the city centre).

Schloss Nymphenburg is beautiful - the view toward the main palace from along the canal is absolutely stunning, particularly when the canal is frozen over in winter, and the interiors of both the main palace and the pavilions are sumptuous. Admission fees certainly aren't excessive, and the palace is only about twenty minutes tram ride from central Munich. Well worth visiting.

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