Correction Appended

CRACOW, the intellectual and historic heart of Poland -- with medieval and Renaissance churches, castles, aristocratic houses and a 16th-century synagogue -- is emerging again as a European city of charm and vibrancy. Many of the elegant small Gothic and Renaissance palaces that rim the main square have been repainted in the last two years. Jazz spots in stone cellars are being scrubbed down; new sidewalk cafes with spiffy furniture and umbrellas are opening almost weekly, it seems. Bookshops, art and antiques galleries show the contemporary and the old. The food, if you choose carefully, is perking up.

This reawakening is taking place against the backdrop of Cracow's immutable strengths: an old town of narrow cobbled streets and 60 churches, the Jagiellonian University, which counts Copernicus and Pope John Paul II among its alumni, and the 13th-century Wawel royal castle, a moody, dark bulk of fortressed walls, onion domes and spires atop a limestone hill. Complementing Cracow's architecture is its music. The variety of excellent music being performed makes Cracow more than just another museum town. During a few days' stay, a Baroque chamber concert in a palace salon, a jazz group in a subterranean club or opera at the 1897 Juliusz Slowacki theater, a glittering miniature version of the Paris Opera, is almost assured.

While the Polish language is formidable to newcomers, a visitor doesn't have to talk to a lot of local people to feel the recent oppressive past of Cracow. The Germans occupied the Wawel Castle during World War II. From there, they ran the Government of Poland, sending the city's more than 60,000 Jews to concentration camps and many of Jagiellonian University's intellectuals as well.

At the close of the war, the Russians moved in and decided to try to break Cracow's intellectual influence. The Communists built the country's largest steel works at Nowa Huta, a soulless satellite city with miles of concrete housing for the new urban proletariat from the countryside and, pointedly, no church. The pollution from the steel works, plus the emissions from hundreds of coal-burning plants in the region, gave Cracow air you could smell, even taste. The exhausts also wreaked havoc on the centuries-old stained glass windows, stone monuments and red bricks from the Middle Ages. Restoration on some of the big structures has started and in some cases is completed. Cracovians say the air seems better lately, a sign, they assume, of the downturn in post-Communist industrial production and perhaps the early benefits of $15 million of pollution control equipment being installed in the region by the United States Department of Energy.

Cracow is above all a walking city -- the old town covers about 173 acres -- and the best way to tackle it is on foot. You can spend a day and get a quick sense or take a leisurely week and not exhaust the possibilities. Perhaps the most logical progression is to start with the Wawel Castle, which looms above the Vistula River at the narrow end of the old town.

Inside, the castle brims with tapestries, furniture of various periods, armor and paintings, many retrieved in the last 30 years from where they had landed after the Nazis looted them. The castle itself is an architectural hodgepodge, largely because it survived fires and plunderings and was rebuilt over the centuries. But this spring, Wawel's Renaissance cloisters in the courtyard were regaining their splendor under workmen's scaffolding and the interior rooms recently reopened have been restored to a high gleam.

Wawel's 14th-century Gothic cathedral, from which Karol Cardinal Wojtyla set out in 1978 for the Vatican conclave that elected him Pope, was carefully overhauled at the turn of this century. It remains in mint condition. Most of the Polish kings and their families are buried in the vaults of the cathedral, along with Poland's revered nationalist leaders, Gen. Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1817) and Marshal Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935), and the 19th-century poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki.

The cathedral is a one-nave and two-aisle structure with small, extraordinarily ornate chapels running off the aisles. The Poles are particularly proud of the Zygmuntowska chapel designed in the early 16th century by the Florentine architect Bartolomeo Berecci. The chapel serves as the mausoleum of the last of the kings and queens of the Jagiello dynasty, which started in the 14th century. The one-story chapel's gold altar is the work of artists, both painters and silversmiths, from early 16th-century Nuremberg.

From Wawel, it is pleasant to take the first part of the royal way -- the thoroughfare in the old days of the kings and their queens in their horse-drawn carriages -- now known as Grodzka Street. Here, ancient churches and new boutiques jostle each other for a visitor's attention. One of Cracow's simplest yet most striking churches, the two-towered pale-stone St. Andrzej, is half way up the street. It looks like an elegant fortress -- no windows, just slits in the stone walls. The Polish history books say it was built in 1079 to 1098 and was partly destroyed when people sought refuge in the church during the Tatar invasion in 1260. The vault, not open to visitors, houses rare Gothic figurines from 14th-century Nativity displays.

Next door to St. Andrzej is the Church of SS. Peter and Paul, the first Baroque construction in Cracow, with an imposing line of statues of the 12 Apostles at the entrance.