Bracka Street
This is most probably the most “literary” street in contemporary Kraków, made famous throughout Poland by a song of the Kraków bard, Grzegorz Turnau. You can walk into the atmospheric Nowa Prowincja café frequented by the aficionados of the pen. A poetic answerphone operates here which lets you listen to the voices of the regulars (and not only): Ewa Lipska, Adam Zagajewski, Ryszard Krynicki, Bronisław Maj, Czesław Miłosz, and Wisława Szymborska, who published her lyrics in the magazine entitled Głos Nowej Prowincji.
On the other side of the street, poems are projected onto a wall of the Potocki Mansion standing on the corner of the Main Market Square. Everyone can join the international Poems on Walls campaign, the first step to having your poem light up the wall is to register at www.emultipoetry.eu. Poems written in cities that, like Kraków, have obtained the title of UNESCO Cities of Literature are regularly presented in the forum.
Literary life is also rife in De Revolutionibus. Books&Cafe run by the Copernicus Centre in the 19th-century Larisch Mansion. Enter it for a lavish selection of works on philosophy and various academic topics, a fantastic reportage section, and carefully selected belles lettres. In the café part, you are more than welcome to order cosmological Milky Way Latte and Black Hole Mocca. Evenings and weekends are taken up by meetings with authors, popular scientific lectures, discussions, and workshops on philosophy and the arts for children and adults.