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NATIONAL CULTURAL MEMORIAL
THE CHATEAU OF LITOMYŠL
On the site of a Slavic fort and frontier castle of the Slavníkids, that was rebuilt in the 15th century by the Kostka family of Postupice, there emerged, in 1568-1581 during the reign of Vratislav Pernštejn, an ancestral and representative renaissance chateau. The construction took place under the supervision of imperial architects Giovanni Battista Aostalli and Ulrico Aostalli, while the decorations (envelope and figural sgraffitoes on facades and gables, and two large-scale battle scenes in the main courtyard) were done primarily by Italian masters. In 1646 the dominion of Litomyšl (chateau and town) became Trauttmansdorf family´s property. They made some baroque adaptations. In 1753 these owners sold the chateau to the Valdštejn-Vartenberk family who were the last to undertake any larger reconstruction. After the fire in 1775, the in-house theater was built in 1796-1797 whose extraordinary set of stage decorations was created by 
a Viennese court painter Joseph Platzer. Many rooms, mostly on the second floor, were decorated in 1790’s in classicism style by a Valdštejn painter Dominik Dvořák with both geometrical and landscape wall paintings. In 1885 the dominion was sold to the Thurn-Taxis family, the last owners of the Litomyšl chateau. In recent times, the chateau was declared a national cultural memorial in 1962, both for its artistic and architectural value, and as a tribute to a Czech national composer Bedřich Smetana who was born in an adjacent brewery on March 2,
