Italian Court

As you look at the monumental stone walls of the former royal palace next to the Kutná Hora Church of Saint James, you will be transported to the times when Wenceslas the Second founded the central mint here before the year 1300. In this fortified residence, which was completed around the year 1400 for Wenceslas the Fourth and extended in the 1490s with the southern house of the mintmaster for Vladislaus the Second of Hungary, silver Prague groschen and thalers were struck for centuries. After the mint ceased operations in the second quarter of the 18th century, the entire complex began to decay, but from 1893 to 1899 the architect Ludvík Lábler radically restored it in a Neo-Gothic purist style. This reconstruction also involved the sculptor and woodcarver Jan Kastner, whose Neo-Gothic room furnishings, including the furniture and altars in the chapel, were so stylistically perfect that art historians could barely distinguish them from medieval originals. Today, this historical gem is protected as a cultural monument and, since 1962, also as a national cultural monument of the Czech Republic.