This is the belle-époque city — the Prague of grand banks, glass arcades and the gold-and-mosaic moment when art nouveau was the national style. Two and a half kilometres, mostly indoors if the weather turns, ending where the moat used to be.
Start at the Obecní dům — the Municipal House, 1912, the art-nouveau showpiece, worked in mosaic and wrought iron down to the doorknobs. The Smetana Hall is the concert room, but the ground-floor café lets anyone in: sit under the painted ceiling first. Next door, the blackened Gothic Powder Tower makes the contrast the city is built on.
Then down Na Příkopě — 'on the moat', because it was one, filled in and lined with 19th-century bank palaces. Duck into a pasáž, one of the glass-roofed arcades, and into the old bank halls of marble and brass you can walk straight into. Off on Panská, the Mucha Museum gathers the posters that fixed the look in everyone's memory — give it an hour.
End at Můstek, where the street meets Wenceslas Square and a fragment of the original moat bridge survives in the station below.
