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Mozart Museum
Mozart stayed at the elegant 17th-century Vila Bertramka during his visits to Prague in 1787 and 1791, as guest of composer František Dušek. Here he finished his opera Don Giovanni . Today, the house is a modest Mozart museum. Regular concerts are held in the salon (see for more details), and in the garden (April to October only).
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Mucha Museum
This fascinating (and busy) museum features the sensuous Art Nouveau posters, paintings and decorative panels of Alfons Mucha (1860-1939), as well as many sketches, photographs and other memorabilia. The exhibits include countless artworks showing Mucha's trademark Slavic maidens with flowing hair and piercing blue eyes, bearing symbolic garlands and linden boughs.
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Municipal House
Prague's most exuberant and sensual building stands on the site of the Royal Court, seat of Bohemia's kings from 1383 to 1483 (when Vladislav II moved to Prague Castle), and demolished at the end of the 19th century. Between 1906 and 1912 the Municipal House was built in its place - a lavish joint effort by around 30 of the leading artists of the day, creating a cultural centre that was to be the architectural climax of the Czech National Revival.
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Musaion
This recently renovated summer palace houses the National Museum's ethnographic collection, with exhibits covering traditional Czech folk culture and art, including music, costume, farming methods and handicrafts. There are regular folk concerts and workshops demonstration traditional crafts such as blacksmithing and wood-carving.
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Museum Of Communism
It would be difficult to think of a more ironic site for a museum of communism - it occupies part of an 18th-century aristocrat's palace, stuck between a casino on one side and a McDonald's burger restaurant on the other. Put together by an American expat and his Czech partner, the museum tells the story of Czechoslovakia's years behind the Iron Curtain in photos, words and a fascinating and varied collection of…well, stuff.
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Museum of Czech Cubism
Though dating from 1912, Josef Gočár's House of the Black Madonna (dům U černé Matky Boží) - Prague's first and finest example of Cubist architecture - still looks modern and dynamic. It now houses three floors of Czech Cubist paintings and sculpture, as well as furniture, ceramics and glassware in Cubist designs.
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Museum of Decorative Arts
This neo-Renaissance museum, opened in 1900, arose as part of a European movement to encourage a return to the aesthetic values sacrificed to the Industrial Revolution. Its four halls are a feast for the eyes, full of 16th- to 19th-century artifacts, including furniture, tapestries, porcelain and a fabulous collection of glasswork.
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Museum of Marionette Culture
Rooms filled with a multitude of authentic, colourfully dressed marionettes from the late 17th to early 19th centuries make up the Museum of Marionette Culture. Star attractions are the Czech figures Spejbl and Hurvínek. The museum is upstairs inside the courtyard.
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Museum of the City of Prague
To see how Prague looked before its walled Jewish ghetto was pulled down and St Vitus Cathedral was complete, pop along to see this museum's utterly charming model of the early-19th-century city. The model was an 11-year labour of love for its creator Antonín Langweil. Other displays cover Prague from prehistoric times to the 20th century.
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Museum Of The Infant Jesus Of Prague
The Church of Our Lady Victorious (kostel Panny Marie Vítězné), built in 1613, has on its central altar a 47-cm tall waxwork figure of the baby Jesus brought from Spain in 1628. Known as the Infant Jesus of Prague (Pražské jezulátko), it is said to have protected Prague from the plague and from the destruction of the Thirty Years' War, and is visited by a steady stream of pilgrims, especially from Italy, Spain and Latin America.
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Náprstek Museum
The small Náprstek Museum houses an ethnographical collection of Asian, African and American cultures, founded by Vojta Náprstek, a 19th-century industrialist with a passion for both anthropology and modern technology (his technology exhibits are now part of the National Technical Museum in Holešovice; ).
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National Memorial To The Victims Of Post-Heydrich Terror
In 1942 seven Czech paratroopers that were involved in the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhardt Heydrich hid in the crypt of the Church of SS Cyril and Methodius for three weeks after the killing, until their hiding place was betrayed by the Czech traitor Karel Čurda. The Germans besieged the church, first attempting to smoke the paratroopers out and then flooding the church with fire hoses.
Read more about National Memorial To The Victims Of Post-Heydrich Terror
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National Monument
Although not, strictly speaking, a legacy of the communist era - it was completed in the 1930s - the huge monument atop Žižkov Hill is, in the minds of most Praguers over a certain age, inextricably linked with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and in particular with Klement Gottwald, the country's first 'worker-president'.
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National Museum
Looming above Wenceslas Square is the neo-Renaissance bulk of the National Museum, designed in the 1880s by Josef Schulz as an architectural symbol of the Czech National Revival.
The displays of rocks, fossils and stuffed animals have a rather old-fashioned feel - serried ranks of glass display cabinets arranged on creaking parquet floors - but even if taxidermy isn't your thing it's still worth a visit just to enjoy the marbled splendour of the interior and the views down Wenceslas Square.
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National Technical Museum
This fun museum has a huge main hall full of vintage trains, planes and automobiles, including 1920s and '30s Škoda and Tatra cars and a couple of Bugattis. The motorcycle exhibit has a 1926 BSA 350-L in perfect nick, and among the vintage bicycles you'll find a 1921 predecessor of the 1970s Raleigh Chopper. Upstairs you can fool around with the cameras in a working TV studio, or head to the basement for a tour down a simulated mineshaft.
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Nerudova
Malá Strana's main thoroughfare plunges steeply downhill from the castle to Malostranské náměstí. Today it's lined with touristy restaurants and shops but you can still admire the 'baroque-ified' Renaissance façades and ornate old house signs. Casanova and Mozart shared lodgings in 1791 at No 33, Bretfeldský Palace. Czech writer Jan Neruda, after whom the street takes its current name, lived at No 47, At the Two Suns (1845-57).
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New Town Hall
The historical focus of Charles Square is the New Town Hall, which was built when the New Town was still new. From the window of the tower, two of Wenceslas IV's Catholic councillors were flung to their deaths in 1419 by followers of the Hussite preacher Jan Želivský, giving 'defenestration' (throwing out of a window) a lasting political meaning, and sparking off the Hussite Wars. (This tactic was repeated at Prague Castle in 1618.)
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Nový Svět Quarter
In the 16th century, houses were built for castle staff in an enclave of curving cobblestone streets down the slope north of the Loreta. Today these diminutive cottages have been restored and painted in pastel shades, making the 'New World' quarter a perfect alternative to the castle's crowded Golden Lane. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe lived at No 1 Kapucínská. Globally renowned animator and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer resides at No 5 Černínská.
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Old Jewish Cemetery
Founded in the early 15th century, the Old Jewish Cemetery is Europe's oldest surviving Jewish graveyard. It has a palpable atmosphere of mourning even after two centuries of disuse (it was closed in 1787). Some 12,000 crumbling stones (some brought from other, long-gone cemeteries) are heaped together, but beneath them are perhaps 100,000 graves, piled in layers because of the lack of space.
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Old Royal Palace
The Old Royal Palace, at the courtyard's eastern end, is one of the oldest parts of the castle, dating from 1135. It was originally used only by Czech princesses, but from the 13th to the 16th centuries it was the king's own palace.
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Old Town Bridge Tower
Perched at the eastern end of Charles Bridge, the elegant late-14th-century tower was, like the bridge itself, designed by Petr Parler. Here, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, an invading Swedish army was finally repulsed by a band of students and Jewish ghetto residents. Today, it houses a fairly humdrum collection of vintage musical instruments, but the main attraction is the amazing view from the top.
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Old Town Hall
Prague's Old Town Hall, founded in 1338, is a hotch-potch of medieval buildings presided over by a tall Gothic tower, acquired piecemeal over the years by a town council that was short of funds. Most notable is House at the Minute (dům U minuty), the arcaded building on the corner covered with Renaissance sgraffito - Franz Kafka lived here (1889-96) as a child just before the building was bought for the town hall.
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Old-New Synagogue
Completed around 1270, the Old-New Synagogue is Europe's oldest working synagogue and one of Prague's earliest Gothic buildings. You step down into it because it predates the raising of Staré Město's street level to guard against floods. Men must cover their heads (a hat or bandanna will do; paper yarmulkes are handed out at the entrance). Around the central chamber are an entry hall, a winter prayer hall and the room from which women watch the men-only services.
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Olšany Cemetery
Huge and atmospheric, Prague's main burial ground was founded in 1680 during a plague epidemic; the oldest stones are in the northwestern corner, near the 17th-century St Roch Chapel (kaple sv Rocha). There are several entrances to the cemetery along Vinohradská, east of Flora metro station, and beside the chapel on Olšanská. Jan Palach, the student who set himself on fire in January 1969 in protest at the Soviet invasion, is buried here.
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Orthodox Cathedral Of Ss Cyril & Methodius
In 1942 seven Czech partisans involved in assassinating Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich took refuge from the Nazis in this church. It's incredibly moving to visit the wreath-bedecked crypt where they resisted attempts to smoke and flood them out and then were either killed or took their own lives. Among multilingual explanations and bullet and shrapnel holes, you can see the Czechs' last desperate efforts to dig an escape route.
