Page:Guide to the Bohemian section and to the Kingdom of Bohemia - 1906.djvu/47

35 make this street a perfect and instructive exhibition of baroque and rococo architecture.

There is in the first place, the palace of the Counts of Morzin (now Černín) with handsome statues and balcony borne up by two black giants, a work of Prokov’s. Also the opposite palace which on the whole is simpler but has a very effective façade (it formerly belonged to the Counts of Slavata, now to Count Thun the late prime-minister of Austria) is worthy of special notice, as the joint work of the Prague architect Anselmo Luragho and the Italian Scotti. It is ornamented by a fine rustica and a fine porch, supported by gigantic eagles, which together with the ornamental stair-case are the work of Mathew Braun, the designer of St. Luitgard on the bridge. Not far from this, in a spot, where many years ago stood the first castle gate with a moat before it, the street is very much narrow and flanked by a whole collection of very interesting old houses beginning with the Redemptorist church of St. Cajetanus. Passing the interesting corner-house (at one time the property of baron Brettfeld, at the end of the XVIIIth. century, a professor at the university and kind host of Mozart, Da Ponte and Casanova) the walls of which rise perpendicularly from the stairs of the St. John’s steep mound, we pass on higher to No. 233, in which Jan Neruda, the father of modern Bohemian literature, spent his youthful years. The street was named after him. It is a small unpretending house and a strong contrast to the opposite grand palace the beauty of which may have inspired the mind of the poet with love for the charms of his native town, the constant theme of his highest praise. This, the palace of the Princes of Schwarzenberg, rises here like a castle in a fairy-tale above the lower houses of Neruda’s street; and above the narrow stripe of fresh green gardens at the foot of the Royal Castle. Its black and white sgrafitti and its high typical gables above the rustica, form an effective contrast to the dark red pantile roofs of the buildings below. And under the steep walls of this palace turning to the right slowly ascends the broad road leading to the Castle, while to the left, passing the high pillar-props of the palace gardens, broad stone stairs lead in the direction of the adjacent Barnabite-nun’s *