Villa Schöningen

Villa Schoningen is a historic house at Berliner Strasse 86 in Potsdam, Germany, near the Glienicke Bridge that connects the city to Berlin. It was built in 1843 by the architect Ludwig Persius, working under the direction of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for the Prussian chamberlain Kurd von Schoning, in the style of an Italian villa. The house was declared a heritage property of Brandenburg in 1977 and became part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin in 1990. It reopened in November 2009 as a museum, inaugurated by Chancellor Angela Merkel with the former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall and telling the story of the nearby Glienicke Bridge, known as the Bridge of Spies for the Cold War agent exchanges held there between 1949 and 1989; a video installation by the artist Stefan Roloff on life in the divided city's border zone forms part of the permanent exhibition. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/