Žvėrynas is a green, quiet neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania, located on the right bank of the Neris River. Its name means "menagerie" or "land of the beasts," as the area served as a private hunting forest for the noble Radvila family from the 16th to 19th centuries. We stop for coffee :)

The Radvila dukes opened this town to Scottish merchants in 1627, and they came in numbers unmatched in the Baltics — magistrates, traders, tavern-keepers, church elders — leaving their names on the brickwork. In 1655 the same dukes swore the Grand Duchy to Sweden here, the closest Lithuania came to leaving Poland. Six nations, four market squares, one of only seven protected old towns in the country.

No one planned it. After the 1831 uprising, families with no bodies to bury planted crosses on an old hillfort instead, and everyone who came after added one. The Soviets bulldozed the hill in 1961, 1973 and 1975 and burned what they cleared; each time the crosses were back within days. Today there are more than a hundred thousand, and on a windy day the rosaries hanging among them make a sound you don't forget.

There is not much here but a field and single monument, which is the point. On 22 September 1236 the Samogitians and Semigallians caught the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in swampy ground where armoured knights could not charge. The Master died with most of his order; one crusader in ten reached Riga. Within a year the survivors had been absorbed into the Teutonic Order, and thirty years of conquest along the Daugava came undone.

Lunch at a classic spot.. hunter's Inn!

Rastrelli built this before he built the Winter Palace — it was his rehearsal, and it shows. Duke Ernst Johann von Biron began it in 1736, was arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1740 with the walls half up, and came back twenty-three years later to finish the job. By 1945 it was a grain store. Forty years of restoration brought it back; the gilt, the stucco and the roses are all where they should be.

Two castles on one spit of land, where the Mūsa and Mēmele meet to become the Lielupe. The Livonian Order raised the first in the 1440s, thick-walled and built for cannon; the dukes of Courland added a Renaissance palace beside it in the 1590s, with tiled stoves and stained glass. Retreating Russians blew up both in 1706 and left them for a century and a half. Climb the tower for the whole of Zemgale.