Prague · Where to stay

You are inside the picture and everything on a first-visit list is a walk away. You also pay the most and get the stag parties and the night noise around Dlouhá and Old Town Square. Worth it only for a short trip where you want the streets at 7am.

The other bank: baroque palaces, steep lanes and a hill that empties completely once the coaches leave. Quieter than the old town, but restaurants thin out at night and the Petřín funicular is shut for track reconstruction. Trams 12, 20 and 22 do the work.

Ten minutes on metro A from the centre, with the best run of ordinary restaurants and cafés in the city, a farmers' market four days a week and quiet nineteenth-century streets. The sensible default for anything longer than two nights.

Žižkov is the old pub district up the hill, scruffy and cheap. Karlín below it was wrecked by the 2002 flood, rebuilt, and now holds the bakeries and the design offices. Both are a couple of tram stops out and both cost noticeably less than the old town.