Kroměříž Castle

For centuries the small Moravian town of Kroměříž was the summer seat of the bishops — from 1777 archbishops — of Olomouc, and their residence here, together with two very different gardens, was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1998. UNESCO's reasoning is candid: the palace is a fine but typical princely residence; what is rare is the Baroque garden layout that survives around it almost intact.

The palace has a long history of destruction and rebuilding. A late-Gothic residence built around 1500 was sacked by the Swedish army in 1643 during the Thirty Years' War. From 1664 Bishop Karl of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn had it rebuilt in Baroque style by the Italian architect Filiberto Lucchese and, after his death, by Giovanni Pietro Tencalla. When fire gutted the building in 1752, Bishop Hamilton brought in two of the leading painters of the empire, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, to decorate the state rooms. Their ceilings still frame the palace's great halls, and the rooms were used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg in the film Amadeus.

The archbishops were serious collectors. The palace picture gallery is regarded as the second most important in the country, and its centrepiece is Titian's late, unsettling Flaying of Marsyas; much of the collection was bought in Cologne in 1673. There is also a musical archive and a library of some 33,000 volumes.

The Flower Garden, a short walk from the palace, is the site's real rarity. Laid out by Lucchese and Tencalla, it blends late Italian Renaissance ideas with French formal design: geometric parterres, clipped hedges, fountains, greenhouses and a 244 m colonnade lined with statues, whose roof terrace gives a view over the whole plan. At its centre stands a rotunda where a Foucault pendulum — a 30 kg weight on a 25 m wire, installed in 1908 by a local teacher — still demonstrates the rotation of the Earth. Next to the palace itself lies a looser, nineteenth-century English-style landscape garden, which was damaged in the 1997 floods.

Getting there

The palace stands in the historic centre of Kroměříž, about 0.3 km from the town centre, and the Flower Garden is a short walk away. The nearest airport is Brno-Tuřany (BRQ), about 54 km away; Brno is the usual base for travellers arriving by rail or road.