Lobkowicz Palace

Of all the buildings inside Prague Castle, the Lobkowicz Palace is the only one in private hands. It belongs to the Lobkowicz family, an old Bohemian noble house, and the audio guide that leads you through its rooms is spoken partly by the family themselves, two generations of them, alongside the curators.

Getting it back took decades. The Nazis seized the family's properties in 1939, they were returned in 1945, and the communist regime took them again in 1948. After 1989 William Lobkowicz, born in Boston, moved to Czechoslovakia in 1991 to join his parents in a long restitution effort, and the palace itself came back to the family in 2002. Four years of restoration followed, and it opened as a museum in April 2007.

What hangs in these 16th-century rooms is what the family gathered over centuries. The painting most visitors come for is Haymaking by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1565, one of six panels on the seasons of the year made for the house of an Antwerp merchant, Niclaes Jongelinck. Five survive, three of them in Vienna and one in New York, and this scene of June and July is the only one still privately owned. Nearby are two views of London by Canaletto, the Venetian painter of city views, bought around 1746 by Prince Ferdinand Philipp Lobkowicz, who had travelled to England to buy horses.

Further on, the collection turns to music, with manuscripts and early printed scores by Mozart and Beethoven. One of Beethoven's patrons was Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz, and it was to him that the composer dedicated his Third Symphony, the Eroica, first played privately for the prince in 1804.