Amid the flat green farmland of southern Latvia, far from any great city, rises one of the most magnificent baroque palaces in all of northern Europe. Rundale Palace, a vast

Designed by Rastrelli for the Duke of Courland, Latvia’s Rundale Palace is a Baroque masterpiece rescued from ruin and known as the Versailles of the Baltic.

On a hill overlooking the ancient Inca capital of Cusco stand some of the most astonishing walls ever built. At Sacsayhuaman, enormous blocks of stone, some weighing well over a

High above the ancient city of Cusco, at over three and a half thousand metres in the thin air of the Peruvian Andes, stand some of the most astonishing stone

There is a small yellow palace on a hill in Potsdam that was never meant to impress anyone. That, oddly, is what makes it unforgettable. When you climb the six

Before the pyramids of Giza rose, the story of monumental stone architecture began a little to the south, at Saqqara, the sprawling desert cemetery of Egypt’s first capital, Memphis. Here

On a river plain in Tajikistan, people were smelting copper and trading lapis lazuli across a continent six thousand years ago. Meet Sarazm, one of Central Asia’s oldest towns.

Some cities are remembered for their armies, others for their gods. Sardis is remembered for its gold. Long before it became a Roman provincial town or a stop on the

On the Don, the Khazars built Sarkel with Byzantine engineers, a brick fortress guarding steppe trade routes, now submerged beneath a reservoir but saved by archaeology.

Almost everyone who comes to this corner of Bavaria comes to see Neuschwanstein, the impossibly famous fairy-tale castle on its crag. But there is a second castle in the valley