Though that plan was changed, it seems that the race is still on. The back story on this event, which was covered mainly as a private VIP party with Madonna, is Vuitton's road rally of 50 classic vintage cars. This event has a long global tradition and brings out the finest museum-quality wheels in the world, which will, of course, look almost as fabulous as an LV handbag.

This was the real reason the company sought to rent the bridge for four days, planning for roadsters and coupes to drive across Charles Bridge, just as they used to before World War II, with the entire event captured in documentary form for posterity.

Now, of course, a Bentley Mark VI or two, along with all the rest, will end up parked on Smetanovo nábřeží, alongside the almost-as-cinematic Vltava River, with its famous bridge in the background. Not a bad arrangement, really, and one that finally seems to have satisfied both preservationists and those into glitz and glamour.

That time-tripping experience was particularly tangible this past weekend on Old Town Square, of course, where a festival of medieval days filled the cobbled expanse with damsels, knaves, knights and horses. The latter, providing a whiff of what city life was really like in the olden days, gave off such an overpowering aroma that many people's imaginings of gentler times before the industrial age had to be quickly readjusted.

It's somewhat mind-blowing now to recall that automobiles like those in the LV rally were actually once sold to the public as an inner-city hygiene solution as much as handy, high-speed transport.

Century-surfing is safer, perhaps, at the movies, where the worst smell likely to be encountered is stale popcorn. At a screening of the classic Czech period piece Markéta Lazarová at Kino Světozor, the much-loved and only movie rep house in New Town, the medieval saga was projected from an apparently damaged DVD (or perhaps one that had been lying around the stables too long?), causing a key scene to fritz out onscreen.

The projectionist simply took the film back 20 minutes, granting the audience a complete review of the sequence leading up to the problem, then the image broke up again. As the frustrated audience walked out, a few noted the lack of explanation and closed box office — no refunds, it seems, on time travel.