Café Louvre

Look up at that first floor window. That's Café Louvre, and in 1911, Albert Einstein sat up there drinking coffee between his lectures at the German University. The café opened in 1902 on Národní třída, near the National Theatre. Within years it became the meeting place for the most important minds in the city. Einstein was a regular. So was Franz Kafka. Karel Čapek, who would later coin the word robot, debated politics here with the country's first president, Tomáš Masaryk. Einstein arrived in April 1911 as a full professor of theoretical physics. He was 32 and already famous for his work on relativity. But the breakthrough was still incomplete. Between lectures, he would come here to think. In his quiet office, Einstein later wrote, he discovered that gravity bends light near the sun. That discovery became the foundation of general relativity, published in 1916. Some of those ideas first took shape at these café tables. When communists took over in 1948, they literally threw the furniture out those first floor windows. The interior was destroyed. Offices and a plumbing shop replaced it. It stayed that way for 44 years. In 1992, an entrepreneur named Sylvio Spohr got the space and slowly restored it. You can still walk up those stairs and sit where Einstein sat.