The Archbishop's Chateau at Kroměříž was the country seat of the bishops and archbishops of Olomouc, and it is one of the few places where a Baroque residence and its gardens have survived together more or less intact. UNESCO inscribed the chateau and gardens in 1998 for exactly that reason. Bishop Stanislav I Thurzo began the building it replaced in 1500, in late Gothic with Renaissance detail.
A fire in March 1752 gutted much of it, and the rebuilding is what you see today. Bishop Hamilton brought in two imperial artists, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, to decorate the halls. The picture gallery that came out of it is generally reckoned the second finest in the Czech Republic, and its best-known painting is Titian's Flaying of Marsyas. Much of the collection was bought in Cologne in 1673 by Bishop Karel.
There is also a library of 33,000 volumes and an outstanding musical archive. If the interiors look familiar, that is because Miloš Forman shot Amadeus here in 1984 and used the chateau as a stand-in for the Hofburg in Vienna. The Flower Garden, laid out by Filiberto Lucchese and Giovanni Pietro Tencalla, sits apart from the building — it is a separate walk of about ten minutes, and the Via UNESCO ticket is the one that covers both.
