The story
Schloss Weißenstein is a rare thing, a great German Baroque palace still owned by the family that built it. Lothar Franz von Schönborn, Prince-Bishop of Bamberg and Archbishop of Mainz, put it up between 1711 and 1718 as a private country seat, and his descendants hold it to this day.
The showpiece is the staircase hall, a vast open well rising through three storeys, worked out with the Viennese architect Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt so that arriving guests could be watched from the galleries above. Upstairs hangs one of the oldest private picture galleries in Germany, roughly 500 paintings the family gathered in the 18th century, with Rubens, Van Dyck and Dürer among them. Downstairs a grotto room is encrusted with shells, minerals and rough tufa, a cool Baroque fantasy of a cave.
