Hotel Růže

This guide to Hotel Ruze in Cesky Krumlov starts with a Jesuit pharmacy on its ground floor, sold off for three thousand gold coins after Pope Clement XIV dissolved the order in 1773 and bought by a Schwarzenberg family already the richest landowners in southern Bohemia. It traces the building back to William of Rosenberg's Renaissance college of the 1580s, through more than a century as an army barracks, to its 1889 reopening as a hotel betting river views could sell rooms the way apothecary jars once sold cures. Its shelves once held glazed apothecary jars from around 1640.