Amadeus | Church of St Giles — the wedding Mozart's father was not told about

The wedding scene is short and slightly furtive. Mozart marries Constanze Weber without his father's blessing, the couple exchange rings under a ceiling boiling with painted saints, and Leopold arrives in Vienna a beat too late to stop it.

Forman filmed it in the Church of St Giles on Husova street in Prague's Old Town, five minutes' walk from the Estates Theatre. From the outside it looks wrong for the job: a stern Gothic shell with two blunt towers, wedged into a narrow lane. Step through the door and the reason becomes obvious. In the 1730s the Dominicans who own the church rebuilt the whole interior as high Baroque, and Václav Vavřinec Reiner covered the vault with one of the largest ceiling fresco cycles in the city — a glorification of the Dominican order, painted in swimming pinks and blues. Reiner liked the room enough to be buried in it.

The church is a working parish, not a museum. There is no ticket desk. Mass is said daily, the Dominicans still live in the cloister next door, and organ concerts run through the summer evenings.

Go in the late afternoon, when the light comes through the south windows and lifts Reiner's ceiling out of the gloom. Stand at the crossing and look up, and you are looking at the exact frame the film used behind the vows.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-licensed view of Husova street and the Church of St Giles, Prague.