Page 72 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Prague

70  PR A GUE AREA B Y AREA

7 Old Town Square: South Side
Staroměstské Náměstí
A colourful array of houses of Romanesque or Gothic
origin, with fascinating house signs, graces the south Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
side of the Old Town Square. The block between The author of two
Celetná Street and Železná Street is especially of the most influ-
ential novels of
attractive. The Square has always been a busy focal the 20th century,
point, and today offers visitors a tourist information The Trial and The
centre, as well as a number of restaurants, cafés, shops Castle, Kafka spent
and galleries. most of his short
life in the Old
Town. From
1893 to 1901,
he studied
in the Kinský
Palace (see p72), where his father later
had a shop. He worked as an insurance
clerk, but frequented Berta Fanta’s
literary salon at the Stone Ram, Old
Town Square, along with others who
U Lazara (At Lazarus’s) wrote in German. Hardly any of his
Romanesque barrel vaulting testifies to the house’s early origins, work was published in his lifetime.
though it was rebuilt during the Renaissance. The ground floor
houses the Staroměstská restaurace.

South Side
. Štorch House
The late-19th-century painting of St Wenceslas on horseback
by Mikuláš Aleš appears on this ornate Neo-Renaissance
building, also known as At the Stone Madonna.

KEY
1 At the Stone Table
2 At the Golden Unicorn
3 Železná Street
4 At the Storks
5 The arcade houses the Grand . At the Stone Ram
Café Praha. The early 16th-century house
6 At the Blue Star sign shows a young maiden
with a ram. The house has been
7 U Orloje restaurant referred to as At the Unicorn due
8 Melantrichova Passage to the similarity between the
one-horned ram and a unicorn.

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