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Description of Bratislava
BRATISLAVA has two distinct sides: the old quarter is an attractive slice of Habsburg Baroque, while the rest of the city has the brash and butchered feel of the average East European metropolis.
More buildings have been destroyed here since the war than were bombed out during it, the whole Jewish quarter having been bulldozed to make way for a colossal suspension bridge and highway. Yet, even though the multicultural atmosphere of the prewar days has gone, there is a certain Central European cosmopolitanism here, at the meeting of three nations - boosted by a thriving cafe culture.
The City
Trams from the main train station offload their shoppers and sightseers behind the Hotel Forum in Obchodna - literally Shop Street - which descends into Hurbanovo namestie, a busy junction on the northern edge of the old town (stare mesto). Here you'll find the hefty mass of the Kostol trinitarov , one of the city's finest churches, its exuberant trompe l'oeil frescoes creating a magnificent false cupola.
Opposite the church, a footbridge passes under a tower of the city's last remaining double gateway. Below is a small section of what used to be the city moat, now a garden belonging to the Baroque apothecary called U cerveneho raka , on your left between the towers, which now houses a Pharmaceutical Museum (Farmaceuticka expozicia; Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 11am-6pm), displaying everything from seventeenth-century drug grinders to reconstructed period pharmacies. The second and taller of the towers is the Michalska brana (Mon & Wed-Sun 10am-5pm), an evocative and impressive entrance to the old town and now a weapons museum; the rooftop view from the top of the tower is superb.
Michalska and Venturska, which run into each other, have both been beautifully restored and are lined with some of Bratislava's finest Baroque palaces. There are usually plenty of students milling about amongst the shoppers, as the main university library is on this thoroughfare. The palaces of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy continue into Panska, starting with the Palffy Palace , at Panska 19, today an art gallery (Tues-Sun 10am-5/6pm), housing a patchy collection of Slovak paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A little northeast of here are the adjoining main squares of the old town - Hlavne namestie and Frantiskanske namestie - on the east side of which is the Old Town Hall (Stara radnica; Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 11am-6pm), a lively hotchpotch of Gothic, Renaissance and nineteenth-century styles containing the Municipal Museum - worth visiting if only for the medieval torture exhibition in the basement dungeons. The Counter-Reformation, which gripped the parts of Hungary not under Turkish occupation, issues forth from the square's Jesuit Church (Jezuitsky kostol), whose best feature is its richly gilded pulpit. Diagonally opposite is the Mirbach Palace (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm), arguably the finest of Bratislava's Rococo buildings, preserving much of its original stucco decor.
Round the back of the Old Town Hall, with the stillness of a provincial Italian piazza during siesta, is the Primacialne namestie , dominated by the Neoclassical Primate's Palace (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm), whose pediment frieze is topped by a cast-iron cardinal's hat. The palace's main claim to fame is its Hall of Mirrors, where Napoleon and the Austrian emperor signed the Peace of Pressburg (as Bratislava was then called) in 1805. You can now visit this, and several other rooms hung with portraits of the Habsburgs and seventeenth-century English tapestries, found by chance during the building's renovation.
Despite its proximity to Vienna and Budapest, the city has produced only one composer of note, Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). The composer's birthplace, a cute apricot-coloured cottage hidden away behind two fashionable shops on Klobucnicka, is now a museum (Tues-Sun 11am-5pm). Beyond, at the top end of Sturova, is Kamenne namestie , overlooked by a giant Tesco supermarket, in front of which the whole city seems to wind up after work, to grab a beer or takeaway from one of the many stand-up stalls, then jabber away the early evening before catching the bus or tram home.
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