Lustgarten and Museum Island

In front of you stretches the Lustgarten, the palace's former pleasure garden, and behind it the Altes Museum, the gateway to Museum Island.

1An island for art

The northern tip of this island in the River Spree brings together five major museums built between 1830 and 1930: the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode Museum and the Pergamon Museum. Since 1999 the ensemble has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Among the treasures kept here are the bust of Nefertiti, in the Neues Museum, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, in the Pergamon.

2Schinkel's museum

The columned building is the Altes Museum, the “Old Museum”. Designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it opened in 1830 as Prussia's first public museum: the royal collections left the palace so that anyone could see them. Count its Ionic columns: there are eighteen. Today it displays art from Greek and Roman antiquity.

The granite bowl in front of you was meant to go inside the museum, in the rotunda. It turned out to be too big, so it stayed outside.

3The giant bowl

Master stonemason Christian Gottlieb Cantian carved it from a huge erratic boulder, a rock dragged by glaciers all the way to Brandenburg. It measures almost seven metres across, and when it was finished in 1831 it was hailed as a technical marvel. The Nazis staged mass rallies in the garden; today's lawn was restored in the late 1990s.

4What to look for

• The eighteen columns of the Altes Museum.
• The granite bowl, polished like a mirror.
• The equestrian statues at either end of the steps.