Prague

Prague is a city of spires and one very famous bridge. A castle runs the whole length of the ridge above the river, and a stone bridge lined with blackened statues crosses beneath it. The Old Town lanes still follow their medieval lines into a square where a six-hundred-year-old astronomical clock performs on the hour. Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Cubist fronts stand shoulder to shoulder on the same street, because the city came through the twentieth century largely intact and nothing ever forced it to start over. Harder to photograph is the other Prague — the beer halls, the river steps, the parks on the hills — which is where the city goes once the day-trippers have gone home.

A fortified seat went up on the castle ridge around 880, and Prague grew as the capital of Bohemia beneath it. Its high point came under Charles IV, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, who turned the city into an imperial capital and gave it a new town, a university and a stone bridge. Religious conflict followed: the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century, then the revolt that began with a defenestration at the castle in 1618 and grew into the Thirty Years' War. Bohemia lost, and for nearly three hundred years Prague was a provincial Habsburg city where German was the language of business. The Czech revival of the nineteenth century rebuilt the culture deliberately — a national theatre paid for by public subscription, a national museum, a national cemetery. Czechoslovakia was declared in 1918, occupied in 1939, and spent four decades after 1948 under communist rule, which ended in November 1989. What makes the city unusual is the physical continuity: almost none of this was demolished.

Two days cover the castle, the bridge, the Old Town and Josefov. Four let you cross the river without a plan, climb Petřín or Vyšehrad, and give an evening to a beer hall.