Page:Guide to the Bohemian section and to the Kingdom of Bohemia - 1906.djvu/48

36 house, the corner of the Toskana-palace. Above the stairs there is an arch, and the whole aspect reminds the beholder of similar picturesque steep streets in Italian towns as Triest and Genoa. At the foot of the stairs there is a simple statue of St. John of Nepomuk, and Neruda’s street is at this point closed in by a fine baroque house (No. 171) „at.at [sic] God’s eye“, which has been visible already from the corner of.of [sic] St. John’s Mound. Passing further two nice houses, „at the white swan“ and „at the white stag“ (No. 230 and 232) we arrive at the Castle-town in the picturesque Hollow-way (Úvoz).

This street also is highly original and characteristic, being at the same time steep and sunny, and it may have its equal only in the steep parts of Brussels, Genoa or Edinburgh. For its unusually high houses covered with massive pantile roofs and ornamented with high peaked gables have in this street (which unlike Mostecká and Nerudova is mostly built in the renaissance style) a height in front of sometimes six, or even seven floors, while at the back they reach to the level of the much higher Loretto-square and even there have two or three floors partly over arcades. It is at the same time one of the most ancient streets of Prague and has preserved better than many others its original old character as it was about the ''middle of the XVIIth. century''. Only the smaller houses in the lower part of the street, having been built much later, show the baroque and rococo style.

Yet in spite of the striking originality of the whole street, the visitor who comes to this spot is at a loss whether to turn his whole attention to these high houses, their projecting turret-windows and balconies, with their terrace-like ascending gardens with broad prop-walls, or to direct his astonished gaze to the bluish shadows of the opposite side. Like a wide bay of a green sea, he sees spreading below and before him an endless succession of gardens, and across the whole prospect, the slopes of the Petřín (Peter’s Mount in German! St. Laurentius’ Mount) with a variety of trees and bushes, lawns and fields, bordered by the battlement of the long fortification-wall on the ridge, with glimpses here and there of the original rock of the mountain. From a thicket of cherry-trees rise the walls of the royal