Once the palace of the beys of Tunis, the Bardo is now a national museum holding the world’s greatest collection of Roman mosaics.

On an island in the middle of the Chiemsee, the largest lake in Bavaria, rises the most ambitious and extravagant of all the palaces built by King Ludwig II, the

There is a French phrase that carries within it both a golden glow and a deep sadness: la Belle Époque, “the Beautiful Era.” It refers to the decades just before

Set upon a gentle slope in Vienna, with one palace at the top of a magnificent tiered garden and another at the bottom, the Belvedere is one of the most

In the summer of 1348 a ship put in at the little Dorset port of Melcombe, near modern Weymouth, and something stepped ashore with the sailors that would kill perhaps

In Ulaanbaatar stands the winter palace of the Bogd Khan, the Buddhist god-king who ruled a briefly independent Mongolia, a compound of temple pavilions and treasures that survived when almost everything else was destroyed.

On Rhoda Island in the middle of the Nile, in the heart of Cairo, stands one of the most enchanting and eccentric palaces in all of Egypt. The Manial Palace,

In the middle of the great river Tagus, in central Portugal, a small rocky island rises from the flowing water, and on it stands one of the most romantic castles

Most great castles rely on a mountain, a crag, or a river bend to make them strong. The Castle of Coca, rising from the flat farmland of central Spain, has

Every nation has a place it regards as its birthplace, a spot where its story is felt to have begun. For Portugal, that place is a hill in the north