Royal Palace
A baroque-classicist palace with a garden on Kazimierza Wielkiego Street, once a Prussian royal residence and now the home of the City Museum's Historical Museum.
Sławomir Milejski Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 pl
What it is
The Royal Palace, formerly the Spätgen palace, stands at 35 Kazimierza Wielkiego Street. It began in the early eighteenth century as the residence of a baron, Spätgen, and in 1750 the Prussian king Frederick II bought it from his heirs. Until 1918 it was one of the residences of the Hohenzollern rulers, who extended it many times, and in the nineteenth century a new wing in the Florentine Renaissance manner was added on the order of Frederick William IV.
Part of it became a museum on 20 September 1926. In May 1945 a fire largely destroyed the buildings and what was in them, and they were rebuilt only in part. Since 2009 the palace has housed the City Museum of Wrocław, and the Henryk Tomaszewski Theatre Museum, another of its branches, is in what remains of the south wing.
Seeing it
The Historical Museum and the Museum of Medallic Art have their seats here. The permanent exhibition is 1000 lat Wrocławia, a multimedia history of the city from the museum's collections, and beside it are the Royal Chambers: six restored rooms, among them a rococo room of Frederick II and baroque rooms of Frederick William II. The building is adapted for visitors with limited mobility.
Hours and prices are on the museum's own page.