Sacked by Vikings, blessed by William the Conqueror, dealt a fatal blow during the French Revolution—these ruins have seen it all.

This deconsecrated church has seen many uses, from a tobacco storehouse to a cinema.

This Roman statue is missing a limb from when the Venetians stole it from Constantinople during the Crusades.

The artist and his brother are buried in a landscape straight out of a van Gogh painting.

A Gothic cathedral created from volcanic rocks.

Stare out over the lagoon and beyond from this 10th-century campanile on the island where the city of Venice began.

The video game-themed street art first popped up in the French city.

This charming cobbled backstreet is the most Instagramable street in Paris, much to the residents' annoyance.

A 16th-century fountain marks the site of a lost medieval cemetery once filled with mass graves.

One of the last umbrella repair shops in Paris upholds the nostalgic art of umbrella making.

What looks like a normal building is really a hollow facade hiding a subway vent.

The industrial architecture honors the laborers who brought the Exposition Universelle of 1900 to life.

This demon atop the Notre-Dame de Paris looks utterly bored.

This 18th-century sundial was designed to calculate the date of Easter each year.

A beautiful Victorian statue shows France's enduring love of the rhinoceros.

This Parisian gem is one of the most incredible ethnographic museums in the world.

Monsters and miniatures are held in equal esteem at this wondrous museum.

Lyon's miniature version of the Eiffel Tower was built as a statement in support of French secularism.

For hundreds of years, automatons moving to metallic music have been marking the passage of time.

The roof of this ancient mausoleum is made from a single Istrian stone weighing a massive 230 tons.

This 6th-century church has the largest and best-preserved collection of Byzantine mosaics outside Constantinople.

Italian poet Dante Alighieri is entombed in this small mausoleum in Ravenna, and his hometown of Florence has never been too happy about it.

The entire known universe of the ancient Etruscans is held inside this bronze model of a sheep’s liver.

The tomb of history's greatest potato promoter is surrounded by tubers.