After visiting the castle and having a great early dinner it is time to start descending towards the Old Town. For this we first find and then descend on historic Nerudova Street that according to our guidebook has some magnificent buildings. We start continuing away from the castle passing the beautiful Schwarzenberg Palace, now a museum.
This area has some lovingly restored historic buildings and we stop almost at every corner to take photos of the beautiful houses.
We pass a shortcut towards Nerudova but we decide not to take it. We want to avoid the stairs as we are already tired but also we want to see a couple attractions nearby, even if just from the outside.
The attractions are Cernin Palace, now home of the Foreign Ministry, and Loreto, a historic pilgrimage site. One cannot be visited and one is closed at this hour but at least we can see them from the outside.
Soon we meet with Uvoz street that a bit further below transforms into Nerudova and start descending. On one side of the street are some beautiful houses already, we especially like the pink marble one, quite eclectic. Here lived the Czech painter Kristian Luna and he added a stone column with the Virgin Mary on top.
On the other side there are some good views of Strahov Monastery and the city. There is no place to build houses on this side for this short section which allows for some nice views.
Soon we are hemmed in on both sides by the buildings of Uvoz and then Nerodova Streets. They are quite beautiful and luckily there are few tourists on this stretch of street this late in the evening, otherwise walking on the small sidewalk would have been a chore.
We pass by a lot of historical houses (all of them in fact) but our guidebook only describes a few. One is Uvoz 4, the Three Red Roses, which houses the King Charles Hotel now. It has a fresco of a Madonna cartouche with three roses at the bottom. Interestingly the roses have no thorns as that is a result of Adam and Eve sinning.
Now we are on Nerudova Street and continue descending while entering the few souvenir stores open on the way and admiring the beautiful buildings on both sides. One attraction are the signs on the houses, before street numbers were introduced that was the way to identify houses on a specific street.
On the way is the Church of St Cajetan. It is worth a short stop to examine the ornate interior and just catch your breath before continuing downwards.
There are a few embassies along this street, between them the Romanian one. Surprisingly the embassy here is housed in a historic palace and considered one of the major attractions.
Nerudova Street ends in Malostranske Square at the bottom of the hill. We explore the historic square for a while, noticing that we cannot enter St. Nicholas Church and then it is a short hop to the Charles Bridge the last attraction for the day.
