In a broad coastal plain south of the Bay of Naples stand three of the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere in the world, and they are not in Greece at all.

In the far west of Ukraine, in the beautiful region of Transcarpathia beyond the great arc of the Carpathian mountains, a mighty medieval castle crowns a lone hill rising abruptly

Where the flat plains of the Gulf coast meet the first forested hills of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the Maya city of Palenque nestles against a green mountainside, its white

In the middle of the Syrian desert, far from any coast, a forest of stone columns rises from the sand. This is Palmyra, an ancient caravan city that grew fabulously

Founded by Milesian settlers on the Kerch Strait, Panticapaeum became the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom, a hub of grain trade where Greek and Scythian worlds fused.

Paquime in Chihuahua, Mexico was a multi-story adobe trading city that bred macaws and engineered running water, linking the Southwest and Mesoamerica from 1200 to 1450 CE.

Before the great terraced splendor of the later Persian capital, there was a quieter, more intimate royal center out on a high plain in what is now southern Iran. Pasargadae

On a high plain in southern Iran stands a simple, dignified stone tomb, its stepped base rising to a small gabled chamber. This is the tomb of Cyrus the Great,

High in the Altai Mountains, ice preserved the tattooed bodies, oldest knotted carpet, and whole horses of Iron Age steppe nomads in astonishing detail.

Most of the castles in this series were born of war, raised to guard a pass or overawe a region, their beauty almost accidental. Peleş is different. It was built