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Throughout summer, this landmark crossing can get so choked with pedestrians that many locals prefer to take alternative routes across the river. But not us. Despite plenty of griping, we’re in love with Charles Bridge. A walk across is a swoony stroll through a four-dimensional picture postcard; the fourth dimension being time. King Charles IV ordered this bridge to be built and, heeding court astrologers’ recommendations, the foundation stone was laid at 5:31 on the morning of July 9, 1357, a time that was considered auspicious because it corresponds to the numerical palindrome 1357 9.7 5:3.1. In the Middle Ages, people believed that truth and divinity could be deciphered from the orderliness of the heavens, which, according to the oldRead more.

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Originally built as a vineyard homestead on what was then the outskirts of Prague, the Bertramka Villa became the property of a singer named Jošefa Dušek and her pianist husband František Xaver Dušek in 1784. The couple struck-up a friendship with the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who visited them on multiple occasions. Mozart completed the score of Don Giovanni here and got help from the Duseks with the Prague productions of his operas Entführung aus dem Serail and the Marriage of Figaro. Today Bertramka is a Mozart museum displaying many of his personal possessions, including arias written in his own hand and a harpsichord on which he composed. They even have a glass cube encasing what is claimed to beRead more.

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The Astronomical Clock is one of Prague’s greatest crowd-pleasers. Tourists pack in front of it at the top of each hour (from 8am to 8pm only) to watch a short parade of statuette Apostles bow to adoring camera-clickers below. While each of the twelve saints has his turn, eight politically incorrect allegorical figures perform a kind of medieval morality play: The statues on either side of the clock’s upper dial represent the four evils according to ancient society — death, vanity, corruption and greed — represented by a skeleton, a mirror, a Turk and a Jew. On either side of the lower dial are statues representing the gothic city’s four messiahs: reading, writing, arithmetic and religion. The timepiece, which wasRead more.