Royal Palace & Dam Square

Palace · Dam Square (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

A merchant republic's town hall of 1648 on the square where Amsterdam began, its marble Citizens' Hall floored with maps of the known world.

The Royal Palace on Dam Square is worth going inside for one room. The Citizens' Hall is a marble room that was open to anyone in the city, with maps of the known world and the night sky inlaid into the floor. Atlas carries the heavens overhead, and the whole room was built to tell a merchant republic how large its reach was. From outside the building gives none of that away: a heavy classical block, deliberately restrained, standing on more than thirteen thousand timber piles driven into wet ground. It went up from 1648 as the town hall of a republic at the height of its wealth, to Jacob van Campen's plan. Louis Napoleon moved in as king in 1808, and it has been a palace ever since. Outside, Dam Square sits on the dam across the Amstel that the city is named after, and it is a crossing point rather than a pretty corner: trams, pigeons, buskers, half the city going through. The tall white column opposite is the national war memorial, where the country stands silent every fourth of May.

Worth knowing

Good to know

It stands on thirteen thousand trees — the whole block rests on timber piles driven through the bog to firm sand, and the count is usually given as 13,659, a number the city has repeated for three centuries.
There are two Atlases — one carries the heavens over the Citizens' Hall inside, and a six-metre figure carries the globe on the back of the building, which almost nobody walks round to see.
On 4 May the square stops — the national two minutes' silence for the war dead is held at the memorial here on that evening, and the crossing point of half the city goes completely quiet.

Things to do

1
Stand in the middle of the Citizens' Hall
The room is the width of the building and lit from above, and the marble makes it colder than the street outside. Find the two hemispheres in the floor, then look up at Atlas carrying the heavens on his shoulders. It was built to be walked into by anybody.
2
Cross the square before eight
The Dam is the busiest space in the city for most of the day and almost empty at dawn. The palace front takes the early light and turns from grey to honey, the trams are still running half full, and the pigeons have the cobbles.
3
Look into the sentencing room
On the ground floor at the front of the building is a cold marble chamber where the town hall pronounced its death sentences, three or four times a year. Quellinus carved Justice, Wisdom and Care into the walls and hid a skull among them. The windows face straight onto the square, because the sentence was read in here and the scaffold went up out there.