Old Royal Palace, Prague

The Old Royal Palace sits within Prague Castle and served as the seat of Bohemian princes and kings from the ninth century into the sixteenth. Its centerpiece is the vast Vladislav Hall, a late-Gothic space with a soaring vaulted ceiling once used for coronation banquets and indoor jousting. Visitors pass Romanesque foundations, Gothic chambers, and the Bohemian Chancellery, site of the 1618 Defenestration that helped ignite the Thirty Years' War. The layered architecture stacks centuries of royal building one atop another.