Neighbourhoods at a Glance - Prague and Czech Republic - page 233

Celetná, leading from the Powder Gate to the Old Town Square, is an open-air
museum of pastel-painted baroque facades covering Gothic frames resting on
Romanesque foundations, deliberately buried to raise Staré Město above the
floods of the Vltava River. But the most interesting building - Josef Gočár's de-
lightful House of the Black Madonna (dům U černé Matky Boží), now the Mu-
seum of Czech Cubism ( CLICK HERE ) - dates only from 1912.
Little Square, the southwestern extension of the Old Town Square, has a
Renaissance fountain with a 16th-century wrought-iron grill. Here, several fine
baroque and neo-Renaissance exteriors adorn some of Staré Město's oldest
structures. The most colourful is the 1890 VJ Rott Building ( OFFLINE MAP
GOOGLE MAP ) , decorated with wall paintings by Mikuláš Aleš, which now
houses the Prague incarnation of the Hard Rock Café.
A dog-leg from the southwestern corner of the square leads to narrow,
cobbled Karlova, which continues as far as Charles Bridge - this section is often
choked with tourist crowds. On the corner of Liliová is the house called At the
Golden Snake OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP (U zlatého hada; ) , the site of Prague's
first coffee house, opened in 1708 by an Armenian named Deomatus Damajan.
Karlova sidles along the massive southern wall of the Klementinum before
emerging at the riverside on Křížovnické náměstí. On the north side of the
square is the 17th-century Church of St Francis Seraphinus OFFLINE MAP
GOOGLE MAP (kostel sv Františka Serafinského; ) , its dome decorated with a fresco of
the Last Judgment. It belongs to the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the
Red Star, the only Bohemian order of Crusaders still in existence.
Just south of Charles Bridge, at the site of the former Old Town mill, is Novot-
ného lávka OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP ( Novotného lávka, Staré Město) , a riverside
terrace full of sunny, overpriced vinárny (wine bars) with great views of the
bridge and castle, its far end dominated by a statue of composer Bedřich
Smetana.
Our walking tour, Not Quite the Royal Way ( CLICK HERE ), follows roughly the
same route but avoids most of the crowds.