Heritage in Europe
A continent of diverse cultures, medieval castles, and ancient empires.
Sites in this Region
Showing 2 documented sites
Stonehenge
The most analysed and most visited prehistoric monument in the world, a series of concentric stone settings on Wiltshire chalk downland that encodes precise astronomical alignments and remains, after two centuries of scientific investigation, genuinely mysterious — the society that built it left no written record and the belief system that motivated its construction must be reconstructed entirely from physical evidence whose meaning is ultimately opaque.
Venice and its Lagoon
A city built on water — 118 small islands connected by 400 bridges and divided by 150 canals, constructed on wooden piles driven into lagoon sediment, and home to one of the most concentrated assemblages of Renaissance and Byzantine architecture in the world. Venice was for four centuries the dominant commercial and maritime power of the Mediterranean, producing a distinctive civilisation that fused Gothic, Byzantine, and Renaissance influences into an urban form that has no equivalent anywhere. It is also, with increasing urgency, a city that is sinking into the sea it was built upon — subsiding by as much as 25 centimetres over the twentieth century while sea levels in the Adriatic simultaneously rise.