Litomyšl Zámek
Czechia
Walk into the second courtyard and the building explains its own ambition. On three sides, arcades climb through every storey, an Italian Renaissance palace plan carried north of the Alps and adjusted for a colder country. The fourth side, the north front, has no arcades at all: it is a solid wall of paired windows, covered on its upper floors in figural sgraffito showing Old Testament subjects, classical themes and battle scenes. Until 1635 a sgraffito-decorated lunette cornice crowned it. Now turn and look at the outer skin of the castle, where around 8,000 small 'envelope' panels, the psaníčka, are scratched into the plaster. One craftsman left his name in the work itself: an inscription in the sgraffito mentions Šimon Vlach, one of a group of Italian masons and stonecutters.
- Written with AI from the Wikipedia article Litomyšl (zámek) (cs.wikipedia.org); facts only from there
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