This part of the castle can be visited only in small groups with guides. 
It comprises the rooms that were once the private apartments of royalty, the rooms for the king's retainers, and those for the royal guests.
The entrance to the apartments is on the first floor, to the south of the staircase. The walls of the rooms are decorated with some of the finest verdures (tapestries representing animals against a landscape background) from the collection of King Sigismund Augustus and with Italian paintings; there are also several examples of Italian furniture. Despite the fire in1702 the rooms retain their original wooden ceilings, fragments of frescoes, and Gothic-Renaissance architraves.
Part of the route to the north of the staircase embraces the rooms which in the 16th century were the personal apartments of the last Jagiellons and which were later repeatedly refashioned - to the order of Sigismund III Vasa, among others (Hen's Foot, Study in the tower, and so-called Alchemia).
In two rooms, arranged according to the taste prevalent in the 18th century, on display are, among other items, specimens of Meissen porcelain - including the magnificent Crucifixion group designed by Kändler - some French, Italian and Dutch pieces of furniture, as well as clocks, textiles, and pictures, along with Polish carpets and goldsmiths' works, such as, e.g. the candelabra wrought by the Gdańsk master J.G. Schlaubitz.
The exhibition includes the reproduced prewar suite of President Ignacy Mościcki, arranged in the Danish Tower in 1929.
The so-called Royal Retainers' Rooms house the temporary exhibition "Art More Precious than Gold...", presenting Polish Gothic and Renaissance art from the collections of the National Museum in Cracow.
The last two rooms of the north wing are the Colonnaded Hall, which in all likelihood owes its stately, Classicist character to the architect Sebastian Sierakowski, having been remodelled in preparation for the visit to Cracow in 1787 of King Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, and the adjacent vaulted Vestibule, with an exit to the Senators' staircase. Particularly noteworthy in these rooms are some portraits, among them of Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, the last king of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, in his coronation robes (studio replica of the painting by Marcello Bacciarelli), of Kajetan Sołtyk, Bishop of Cracow, by the same artist, and of the Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus Wettin, grandson of King Augustus III, the Duke of Warsaw from 1807-1815 (a signed work by Anton Graff). The furnishings include two tapestries featuring ancient deities (from the series woven at Słonim for Michał Kazimierz Ogiński between 1784 and 1788), a set of Classicist furniture, carved and gilt, covered with patterned cordovan, as well as a group of French candelabra of gilt bronze. The large-format painting in the Vestibule, executed by Bacciarelli in ca. 1782, represents the Apotheosis of John III Sobieski. An important patriotic accent is formed by some mementoes of Tadeusz Kościuszko, placed in a corner cabinet in the Vestibule - wooden snuffboxes, turned by the Commander-in-Chief himself (one of them contains a lock of his hair), and a miniature of the young Kościuszko, painted by Jan Rustem.