Prague for The Romantics: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

The Čertovka mill wheel still turns under the Charles Bridge arch; sit on the wall as the lamps come on across the water.

Letters to Felice, the Castle manuscripts and the Trial, laid out in a dim warren of rooms a few steps from the Čertovka; an hour, then the river again.

Roast duck with red cabbage under low vaulted ceilings, oil paintings and candlelight, a piano somewhere down the hall.

Dvořák, Smetana and Mucha under art-nouveau arcades beside the rotunda, then the ramparts, which drop straight to the river and are the best bench in the city.

The family's own collection in their castle palace, Beethoven's manuscripts and Canaletto's London, with a café terrace over the Malá Strana roofs.

Window table facing the castle, Viktor Oliva's Absinthe Drinker on the wall, and the dining room where the dissidents met Havel.

A tiny baroque terrace garden hidden behind a palace door, climbed to a belvedere that frames St Nicholas's dome.

Dvořák Hall, where the composer conducted the first concert in 1896; a cheap seat, the Czech Philharmonic, and an afternoon of sitting close.

The riverside terrace under the bridge piers, lamplit and quiet by late evening, with venison and a Moravian red.

A baroque garden behind the Senate with peacocks on the lawns, a dripstone wall full of hidden faces and a pond of carp; free and quiet at ten.

The 1911 cabaret room where Kafka, Brod, Hašek and Werfel drank, now a plain café with the same plaster and almost no one in it.

A neo-renaissance ceiling rediscovered under plasterboard, veal schnitzel, and the pastry trolley before the airport bus.