Zámek Veltrusy

The chateau sits inside one of the largest English-style landscape parks in the Czech Republic, its paths crossing the Mlynsky brook past follies built for the Chotek family: Laudon's Pavilion, the Doric Temple, the Egyptian Cabinet with its sphinx bridge and a riding school pavilion counted among the largest of its kind in Europe. Fallow deer still graze the far side of the grounds, much as they did when the park was first laid out. The Baroque core was begun in 1704 to a design attributed to Giovanni Battista Alliprandi, its central cylindrical hall a story taller than the four wings that fan out from it in the shape of St. Andrew's cross. Rudolf Chotek doubled the length of the wings in the 1740s and 1750s, and in 1754 Empress Maria Theresa came in person to inspect the estate and its Grand Fair of Bohemian goods, the first trade fair anywhere to use samples and catalogues. Around 1804 the architect Jan Filip Jöndl reworked the facades in the classicist style then in fashion, replacing the original conical roof with a dome. The chateau and its park have drawn filmmakers for a century, most famously as a set for Milos Forman's Oscar-winning Amadeus.