Our Last Day in Prague 10-20-15

Today is our last full day in Prague, I wanted to take Deb to the Mucha Museum and she wanted to see the Lobkowicz Collection.
So since the Lobkowicz is up near St. Vitus in the Palace complex we decided to go there first.  So we walked over to the tram stop we used yesterday and rode up to the appropriate stop before getting off.  As we walked towards the gate we passed the Royal Gardens and walked in to have a look.  It was created in the 1500's and has been functioning ever since.  It is among other things an arboretum and has many specimen trees from around the globe, but it was also the first place in Europe to begin cultivating tulips and introduced them to the Netherlands.  It is quite attractive and very well kept up, the gardeners were preparing new beds for winter planting as we walked through.  The views of the cathedral from the gardens are quite good, certainly much better than anywhere in the palace complex.
So we walked through the complex past the cathedral and down to the Lobkowicz palace.  It is at the lower end almost at the lower gate.  Their family story is certainly dramatic, they were a noble family that operated very close to the monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire from the 15th century up to the 20th century.  Things were still going well until the Nazi occupation when everything was confiscated, after the defeat of Germany their possessions were restored to the family only to be confiscated again when Czechoslovakia was absorbed into the Soviet sphere.  The family escaped to the U.S. and lived in New York until the fall of the Iron Curtain and emergence of the Czech Republic.  In the early 90's they came back and made claims against the new government and were granted much of their previous property and palaces.  At that point they were land rich and money poor so it seems likely that they ceded some of  their previous property to the republic and then created a foundation and museum to showcase their former glory to the public.
The first exhibition rooms display two rooms of portraits of family and friends, like the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Spain.  The next room shows family dinner services dating from the 1500's to the 1900's. This is followed by historic religious relics, armaments, and musical instruments.  In the musical displays are the original manuscripts of Mozart's reorchestration of Handel's Messiah and Beethoven's 4th and 5th symphonies in their own hands.  There are then artworks by Breugel, Canaletto, and Cranach to round out the floor.  Throughout the floor they refer to larger collections of various things at the other two palaces they have just outside Prague.   We then finished with a tour of the next floor of family oriented rooms with minimal furnishings but many artworks on the walls.
After our visit to the museum we ate lunch at the palace cafe to finish out the morning.
We then rode down hill and visited the Mucha Museum, dedicated to the works of Alfons Mucha, the first major proponent of the Art Nouveau movement.  It's not a large museum and they don't allow photographs so other than to say that it's quite interesting and has many beautiful works on display I will just recommend it to visitors to Prague.