Four days in Brno: the capital of Moravia, where the Czechs drink wine

Brno's old town is a triangle of squares and it takes an afternoon to walk properly. Start in the middle, where the city put up an astronomical clock in 2010 that is a tall black granite column shaped like a bullet, tells the time in a way nobody can read, and is universally described by locals in terms that do not print well.

Work north from there past the old town hall, where a dragon hangs from the ceiling of the passage. It is a crocodile, everybody knows it is a crocodile, and the story attached to it is much better than the truth.

Then the church, and the reason to save it for last: underneath the square in front of it is a bone chamber nobody knew about until 2001, when a survey found it. It is not a curiosity so much as a graveyard that ran out of room, and it takes twenty quiet minutes.

The villa is the reason architects come to Brno. Mies van der Rohe built it in 1929 and 1930 for a young textile family who lived in it for eight years before the war took it from them, and what he did with a sloping site is still startling: you enter at the top, on the street, and the whole house opens downwards to a single glazed living floor with a wall of onyx across the middle and windows that sink into the ground at the turn of a handle.

It is a guided visit, an hour, and you must have booked. Afterwards walk ten minutes downhill to the café below, which is by another Brno modernist and has been serving coffee in the same room since the end of the 1920s.

Then take a tram back across town and climb the other hill. Špilberk was a Moravian royal seat, then an Austrian fortress, then the prison the Habsburgs sent their political enemies to, and the casemates cut into the rock below it are the part that stays with you. The park on the slopes is where the city goes on a Sunday.

Twenty kilometres north of the city the limestone gives way and a river disappears into it. What is left on the surface is forest and dry valleys; what is underneath is more than a thousand known caves, five of them open to visitors, and a hole in the ground that is the deepest of its kind in the country.

Take the early train to Blansko and the shuttle from there, and book the cave tour for the morning if you are coming in summer. The visit is on foot for the first half and then by boat, and the water is cold enough that people who ignore the advice about a jacket regret it.

The tour surfaces at the bottom of the sinkhole, which is the moment worth coming for: a shaft of daylight a hundred and forty metres above you, trees growing on ledges up the walls. A cable car and a footpath take you back up to the rim, where two platforms look straight down into it.

Get back in the late afternoon and eat in town. The valley restaurants are functional rather than good.

The cathedral hill is five minutes from the station, so the last morning arranges itself. Go up first, then down to the monastery, then walk to the platform.

Listen for the bells. Petrov rings noon at eleven o'clock. The story Brno tells about it goes back to the Swedish siege of 1645, when the besieging general is supposed to have said he would give up if the city had not fallen by midday, and the bell-ringer took him at his word an hour early. The Swedes left. The bells have never been put right.