Piast Castle

The brick Piast Castle on the northern edge of the Old Town should be your first port of call. Erected in the 13th century, it was rebuilt in Gothic style (two towers from that period survive), then thoroughly modernised in the 1530s as a Renaissance residence, and again in 1835 when the noted German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel gave it a neoclassical look. Enter through the main gate, which is embellished with a Renaissance portal (1533), the only significant remnant of the 16th-century renovation.

A glass pavilion in the middle of the courtyard shelters the foundations of the 13th-century Romanesque Castle Chapel. The castle is now part of the city university.