The 800-year-old town is clean as well as bright. Every morning at 6am, headscarved women with brooms and dustpans sweep downtown Cesky. I saw two hurrying to pick up a discarded tissue.
Hotels are very comfortable and very folk-furniture, with carved chests, spine-warping stools, paintings of kerchiefed peasant maids. There's a restaurant every 15 paces. The Centrum alone holds 80-plus eating places. Try onion soup with dumplings; goulash with dumplings; raspberry tart (dumplings optional).
It's a town stacked with museums. The Folk Puppet Museum; the terrifically tacky Torture Museum (be photographed on the rack and/or buy your own thumbscrews); the Archaeological Museum; the Wax Museum (legendary Czechs such as Harry Potter and Michael Jackson); the excellent Porcelain Museum.
Do take in the Egon Schiele Museum and Gallery. The edgy, early 20th-century Expressionist painter was welcomed to Cesky Krumlov with open arms, till burghers learned about his off-canvas technique with women models; then he was expelled with pointing fingers. Schiele's big, unsettling portraits with flesh in green and yellow, plus his unexpectedly lovely townscapes, fill two floors.
Do visit The Castle, rising above the town on a crag so steep you expect it to topple on you. Actually, you can't miss it - its gaudy, galleried, 18th-century tower is on every second postcard. You enter over a moat where brown bears mope among their own excrement; the SPCA isn't big in Middle Europe.
The Rosenberg family ran Bohemia for decades; their five-petalled rose is everywhere in The Castle. So are their portraits across the generations. The kids were always painted with anticipated adult features; to show their youthful faces was seen as a threat to their reaching adulthood.
Rosenberg coats of arms also abound. Their symbols changed with the family's military victories; after one they added a severed Turk's head being pecked by ravens.
There's a gilded coach that was built to carry the Rosenbergs 8km through Rome, then never used again. Every room has at least one bearskin rug; best of luck to the present inhabitants of the moat.
In the ballroom, painted crowds of masked revellers peer from around corners or into fake mirrors at their own reflections. An astonishing 18th-century theatre, restored after 30 years' work, can change a forest to a prison in 12 seconds. Because of its age and its tinder-box wooden construction, the theatre is used only once or twice a year.
There are unadvertised bonuses in and around Cesky Krumlov.
You can raft the Vltava. You can bike beside it, past trees where swallows swoop and red squirrels ribbon up trunks.
You can amble into woods of lime, oak, spruce and scarlet rowan. There are hazards as well. Using up your camera capacity in a day is one. Being stabbed by the umbrellas of tour parties is another. Dumpling overload, plus the cultural dislocation of coming across saffron-robed Buddhist monks checking out the stand of Bohemian Beer Fest T-shirts should also be mentioned.
But surrender yourself to a place so sweet it makes your fillings ache, and you'll have a grand time.
Just don't be seen dropping a tissue.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Most major European airlines fly to Prague. Coaches for the 120km journey from Prague to Cesky Krumlov take two to three hours.
Further information: See ckrumlov.info.
David Hill paid his own way to Cesky Krumlov; information source: Wikimedia.
