Bucovice Chateau

Bucovice was built between 1567 and 1585 for Jan Sembera Cerny of Boskovice by Pietro Ferrabosco and Pietro Gabri, and it is unusual in the Czech lands for being a straight Italian Renaissance palace rather than a castle adapted into one: a square block round an arcaded courtyard on flat ground, designed from nothing in the Italian idiom, and never afterwards remodelled in baroque or nineteenth-century taste, because the owners moved elsewhere and left it. The courtyard has three storeys of arcades and a large bronze and stone fountain of the 1630s in the middle. Several ground-floor rooms keep painted and stuccoed decoration of the 1580s - the Hare Room, the Emperor's Room, the Bird Room - with grotesque ornament and mythological scenes, among the best surviving Renaissance interiors in the country. The gardens have been partly restored to the Renaissance layout.

What you actually see

• A purpose-built Renaissance palace - Italian idiom, never later remodelled.
• Three storeys of arcades - round a courtyard with a 1630s fountain.
• Painted 1580s rooms - the Hare, Emperor and Bird rooms with grotesque ornament.
• A restored Renaissance garden - laid out again to the original plan.

When to go

April to October. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Guided tours only, seasonal, closed in winter. Only part of the building is furnished - much of it is empty, which is the reason the decoration survived. The town is small.

Nearby

Slavkov u Brna is west; Brno is beyond it.