Nové Mesto (New Town) and Vysehrad

As Prague outgrew its Old Town parameters, Charles IV extended the city's fortifications. A high wall surrounded the newly developed 2½-square-km (1½-square-mi) area south and east of the Old Town, tripling the walled territory on the Vltava's right bank. The wall extended south to link with the fortifications of the citadel called Vysehrad. In the mid-19th century, construction boomed in Romantic and neo-Renaissance styles. Wenceslas Square and avenues such as Vodickova, Na Porící, and Spálená saw a welter of development. One of the most important structures was the Národní divadlo (National Theater), meant to symbolize in stone the revival of the Czechs' history, language, and sense of national pride. This national feeling was compounded in 1918 with the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state, and with it a new era of modernist architecture, particularly on the outer fringes of the Old Town and in the New Town. One of modernism's most unexpected products was cubist architecture, a form unique to Prague, which produced four notable examples at the foot of ancient Vysehrad.

Václavské námestí is a long, gently sloping boulevard rather than an actual square. More than Old Town Square, it's the commercial heart of Prague today as much as it was a hundred years ago. At the end of November 1989, hundreds of thousands of Czechs gathered here to demand an end to the communist government. The image beamed to television sets around the world showed thousands of Czechs jangling their keys as a signal of protest—"Time to leave."