The bridge over the Rio de San Cassan marks the edge of the Carampane, the quarter to which late-fourteenth-century Venice moved its registered prostitutes, far from any church.
The four stone figures of Campo dei Mori are traditionally the Mastelli brothers, merchants said to have come from the Morea. The one at the corner of the bridge, Sior Antonio Rioba, was Venice’s talking statue.
Sansovino designed it, the facade was never finished, and from 1914 to 1991 the great upper hall of the Misericordia was the gymnasium of the Reyer, Venice’s basketball club. It reopened as a public hall after a restoration completed in 2016.
Tommaso Temanza rebuilt the church of the Maddalena between 1763 and 1790 on a circular plan, one of only two in Venice. The inscription and the eye above its portal have been read as masonic ever since.
The isolated building in the middle of Campo Santa Margherita was built in 1725 as the guild hall of the Venetian furriers and tanners, the Varoteri. Its separation fed a long-lived story about the city executioner.
The astronomical clock over the entrance to the Merceria was unveiled on 1 February 1499. Its face gives the hour, the phase of the moon and the sign of the zodiac, and two bronze figures have struck its bell for five centuries.
The campanile of Piazza San Marco collapsed on 14 July 1902 and was rebuilt to the same design by 1912 — the decision that gave European conservation its most argued-over formula, dov’era e com’era.
Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, holds 17,000 petroglyphs spanning the Bronze Age to the Timurid period, 101 identified shrines, and a documented connection to the Mughal founder Babur, who built a prayer house on its slopes in 1496. UNESCO inscribed it in 2009 as the most complete example of sacred mountain worship in Central Asia.
Twyfelfontein in Namibia’s Kunene Region holds at least 2,500 Stone Age rock engravings on 212 sandstone slabs — Africa’s most concentrated open-air archive of San hunter-gatherer art, including therianthropic shaman figures and a remarkable image of a seal carved 100 kilometres from the nearest coast. Namibia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2007, it lies approximately 450 km northwest of Windhoek and can only be visited with a licensed guide.
Kizhi Pogost on Kizhi Island, Lake Onega, preserves two extraordinary 18th-century wooden churches — the 22-domed Church of the Transfiguration (1714) and the 9-domed Church of the Intercession — built without iron nails using the interlocking log-joinery techniques of Karelia, now the centrepiece of an 89-building open-air museum of Russian northern wooden architecture.
