Budweiser Gate (Budějovická Gate)

About this audio guide

The guide to the Budweiser Gate in Český Krumlov opens around fifteen ninety-eight, with an architect named Benedetto Domenico Cometta lifting a fortress design straight out of a printed book by the Italian Sebastiano Serlio, a drawing Serlio himself never built. Hired by Petr Vok, the last Rosenberg lord, to raise the town's ninth and final gate, Cometta copies that imagined fortress front onto the side facing rival Ceske Budejovice, and you'll hear how much of that intimidating stone is really paint and plaster. It then turns you around to the gate's other face, with its warm red walls, playful window frames and a working sundial, a very different personality from the one meant to scare off an approaching army.