Clementinum

The Clementinum is less a single building than a small town of learning, folded into the Old Town of Prague a few steps from the Charles Bridge. Its site was held by Dominicans in the thirteenth century; in 1556 the Jesuits arrived and slowly turned it into one of the largest colleges their order ran anywhere, a complex of courtyards, churches, lecture halls and observatories that today covers roughly two hectares. The great Baroque rebuilding came between 1709 and 1726, with Carlo Lurago, František Maxmilián Kaňka and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer among the architects who shaped it over the decades. After the order was suppressed in 1773, the library founded here in 1781 grew into what is now the National Library of the Czech Republic, which still occupies the complex.

The reason to come is the Baroque Library Hall, finished in 1722. It is a long, two-storey room of carved bookcases and gilded Corinthian columns, with a slender gallery running around the upper shelves and a painted ceiling by Jan Hiebl that pretends to open into a dome. The frescoes celebrate learning as a temple of wisdom, and down the middle of the floor stands a line of old terrestrial and celestial globes. Around 27,000 volumes, mostly theology and much of it in foreign languages, fill the cases. Visitors look in from the doorway rather than walk the floor, which keeps the room exactly as it should be seen: quiet, warm and unbroken from end to end.

Above it rises the Astronomical Tower of 1722, about 68 metres high and crowned by a lead Atlas carrying the heavens, a figure from the workshop of Matthias Bernhard Braun. From the 1750s the tower held a proper observatory, and in 1775 regular weather measurements began here, a series that has continued in the same place ever since and is counted among the longest of its kind in Europe. Halfway up is the Meridian Hall, where a taut string marks the Prague meridian: when a beam of sunlight through a small opening touched the line, it was noon. The climb of 172 narrow steps ends on a gallery with one of the best views over the red roofs, spires and bridge towers of the Old Town. Nearby, the Mirror Chapel of 1722–1724 carries more of Hiebl's painting among its glittering mirrored panels.

Getting there

The Clementinum stands in Prague's Old Town (Staré Město), about 0.3 km from the centre, with entrances on Mariánské náměstí, Karlova street and Křižovnická street. The nearest metro station is Staroměstská on line A, a few minutes' walk away, and several tram lines stop there too. Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) is about 11 km away by straight line.