Nesvizh Castle

Nesvizh was the principal seat of the Radziwill family, who held it from 1533 until 1939, and the castle was rebuilt continuously across that span: an Italian-trained architect, Giovanni Maria Bernardoni, laid out the first stone version in the 1580s within earth bastions, and successive generations added ranges, changed the fronts and remodelled the interiors, so the building carries Renaissance, baroque, rococo and classicist work together around a courtyard. Restoration completed in 2012 opened around thirty rooms as a museum. Landscape parks laid out in the nineteenth century surround the lakes. The Corpus Christi church in the town, also by Bernardoni and consecrated in 1593, holds the family crypt with over seventy burials.

What you actually see

• The courtyard ranges - the successive building periods around one court.
• The museum rooms - the restored interiors through the palace.
• The parks and lakes - the nineteenth-century landscape around the castle.
• Corpus Christi church - the 1593 church and the Radziwill crypt.

When to go

May to September for the parks; the museum works year round with reduced winter hours and closes on some days. Weekends bring coach groups. It combines with Mir castle, half an hour away.

Honest expectations

Interiors are restoration rather than surviving ensembles, since the contents were dispersed. The museum route is long and can be crowded. The crypt in the town church has its own access hours. The town is small.

Nearby

Mir castle lies northwest; Slutsk is east.