Sabatini Garden

This guide to Sabatini Garden in Madrid follows a set of marble kings commissioned in the 1740s to crown the Royal Palace roofline, only to be shelved when the stone proved too heavy for the cornice. It traces the ground itself through a second life as the royal stables, then through the fall of the monarchy in 1931 and a stalled civil-war-era plan to turn the spot into a public garden. Look around the pool and clipped hedges for where those long-exiled statues finally ended up.