Prague's culture runs deeper than its skyline: the world's largest holding of Czech cubism, a concert hall Dvořák conducted in, and Adolf Loos interiors you can still walk through. Three days across Holešovice, Vinohrady and Žižkov, away from the bridge queues.
Prague's 1928 functionalist trade fair palace holds the National Gallery's modern collection: Czech cubism, Kupka's abstractions and the only Picasso, Klimt and Schiele rooms in the country. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
A white concrete wedge grafted onto a Holešovice factory block, DOX shows political and conceptual work few Czech institutions will touch. The Gulliver airship — a 42-metre wooden zeppelin on the roof — doubles as a reading room.
Loos built this 1930 Střešovice house as the built argument for his Raumplan: a blank white cube outside, a cascade of half-levels in Cipollino marble and mahogany inside. Entry by timed guided tour only, small groups.
Jože Plečnik's 1932 church on náměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad looks like an Egyptian temple crossed with a Czech barn: a dark brick nave studded with granite blocks, under a glazed tower clock 7.5 metres across.
Mozart conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni here on 29 October 1787, and the pale green neoclassical auditorium of 1783 survives almost unchanged. Opera and Czech drama run most nights with English surtitles.
The National Theatre's café since 1884, with Viktor Oliva's Absinthe Drinker on the wall and window tables looking over the Vltava to the Castle. Havel and the dissident theatre crowd argued here through the 1970s.
A deconsecrated Baroque church in Malá Strana holding 400 instruments, including a 1699 Amati violin, Baroque glass trumpets and the piano Jan Ladislav Dusík played. Listening posts pair each case with a recording.
Opened 1885 and home to the Czech Philharmonic, Dvořák Hall is one of Europe's oldest purpose-built concert halls; Dvořák himself conducted the orchestra's first concert here in 1896. Season runs September to June.
The rock fortress where Czech legend places Libuše's prophecy of Prague. Slavín cemetery holds Dvořák, Smetana, Mucha and Karel Čapek, and the neo-Gothic Basilica of St Peter and Paul is painted floor to vault in Art Nouveau vines.
The concrete quay below Vyšehrad is Prague's open-air living room: vaulted ice-cellar doors converted into galleries and bars, boat cafés moored along the wall, and a farmers market filling the whole stretch on Saturdays from 08:00.
Built 1985–92 by the communist regime and now hung with David Černý's ten faceless crawling babies. The 93-metre observation deck gives the clearest read of Prague's layers: Žižkov's tenement grid set against the Castle ridge.
A 1927 Žižkov theatre reopened in 1995 as the city's central independent culture house: world music, Czech alternative bands and late DJ sets across three floors, with a bar mosaicked by František Skála from salvaged junk.