The Royal Garden runs along the north side of Prague Castle, and at its far end stands a small Italian Renaissance palace with a copper roof shaped like an upturned ship's hull. An arcade wraps the ground floor, carved at head height with hunting scenes and mythology you can read as you walk past it. In front of it a bronze fountain of 1568 drips into its own basin. The garden around them was never meant as a park.
Walk it and you are in a collection, not a park. Ferdinand I began laying it out in 1534 on ground that had been castle vineyards, and he filled it with exotic species, an orangery and fig trees kept under glass. The palace at the far end went up for his wife between 1538 and 1565, started by the Italian Paolo della Stella and finished by Bonifác Wohlmut. Under Rudolf II the place stopped being an ornament and became an instrument: his astronomers worked from the open arcade, and the readings taken there are what Johannes Kepler turned into the laws of planetary motion. Nothing on the gravel marks it, and the arcade looks like decoration until you know.