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Heading westward from Zrinjevac along either Teslina or Hebrangova, it's a five-minute walk to Trg maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Square), a grandiose open space dominated by the solid, peach-coloured pile of the Croatian National Theatre.

Opened by Emperor Franz Josef in 1890 and boasting a Neoclassical portal topped by a trumpet-blowing muse, it's an ostentatious statement of late nineteenth-century Croatia's growing cultural self-confidence. In front of the theatre, in a circular concrete pit, is yet another work by Megtrovič, the tender-Iv erotic Well of Life (1905), while in the southwestern corner of the square, somewhat overshadowed by a trio of pines, is a sculpture by Fernkorn, showing St George on a rearing horse laying into a snarling dragon.

On the western side of the square, a long gabled building houses the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Muzej za umjetnost i obrt; Tues–Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 10am–fpm; www.muo.hr), a rewarding collection of furniture, ceramics, clothes and textiles from the Renaissance to the present day.The intenor is impressive in itself, with gilt lion heads gazing down from cast-iron balustrades above the central atrium. The first floor kicks off with a fifteenthcenturyVirgin and Child altarpiece of Tyrolean origin, continues with a parade of furniture and porcelain through the ages, and culminates in a hall of religious art with restored wooden altarpieces from churches all over northern Croatia. Most striking is the seventeenth-century altar of St Mary from the village of Remetinec, northeast of Zagreb, showing a central Madonna and Child flanked by smaller panels in which a whole panoply of saints bend in a stylized swoon of spiritual grace. There's a fine selection of seventeenth-century paintings in the first-floor ambulatory notably Charles Lebrun's fleshily sensuous Bacchanal, and Guido Rem's Aeneas and Dido, in which the love-struck pair fix each other with puppy-like gazes. Objects on the second floor reflect Zagreb's status at the turn of the twentieth century as a prosperous outpost of Mitteleuropa, with locally produced ceramics from the Arts and Crafts School (Zagreb's school of applied art, opened in 1882), as well as imported furnishings – notably Tiffany and Galle glassware, and a plant-pot stand by doyen of the Viennese arts-and-crafts scene prior to World War Ljosef Hoffmann. The stairs leading up to the third floor are lined with examples of 1960s poster art, including several geometric designs produced by the Croatian abstract art pioneer Ivan Picelj. At the top lie an array of clocks from throughout the ages, a lot of silverware, and a collection of early twentieth-century stained glass produced by local firm Koch & Marinković. Among the last, look out forVilko Gecan's Life of the Woodcutter (Život drvosjece) from 1924, five idealized panels illustrating the life cycle of the Croatian peasant, depicted here with the kind of reverence one would normally expect from a church altarpiece.