Charlottenburg

For the last week I’ve been in the Berlin area, I’d been wanting to check out Charlottenburg, a part of town known for its enormous and ornate Baroque palace and gardens.  Today seemed like the perfect opportunity! I got a ride there, which saved a bit of time- I needed every minute inside the palace since there was so much to see.

Schloss Charlottenburg was mostly destroyed during WWII, so like many of Berlin’s historic structures, it was painstakingly reconstructed relatively recently at great expense.  Almost none of the original furnishings survived the war’s fires and air raids, so much of what’s there now was brought in from the area’s other palaces (including the now-demolished Berliner Schloss) to make the atmosphere a little more reminiscent of how it was a few hundred years ago. The palace now houses many priceless works of art, but many of the original ceiling paintings were replaced by white ovals during the rebuilding process.