Colmar is the gateway to Alsace’s UNESCO heritage circuit: the Unterlinden Museum’s Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–1516, the greatest Northern Renaissance painted altarpiece, with Grünewald’s medical-realism Crucifixion) and Strasbourg’s inscribed Grande Île (Gothic cathedral, Petite France, Wilhelmine Neustadt) 35 minutes north.
Butrint — inscribed 1992, extended 1999 — is one of the Balkans’ most important ancient cities: a Greek colony (c. 650 BCE) occupied by Romans, Byzantines, Angevins, and Venetians, with a 3rd-century BCE theatre and Albania’s largest Early Christian floor mosaic (c. 450–550 CE, 15×9.5m). Gjirokastra’s stone Ottoman city and Berat’s “thousand windows” are within 1.5–3.5 hours.
The neo-Baroque, domed house at Na Poříčí 7 was built in 1894 by Alfons Wertmüller for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute — the office where Franz Kafka was employed. Today it is the Century Old Town hotel.
Two adjoining buildings on Wenceslas Square — the Zlatá Husa of 1909-10 by Emil Králíček and the Ambassador, built 1912-13 and a hotel since 1922 — form one of Prague’s historic hotels, a listed cultural monument.
Designed in 1880 by Josep Oriol Mestres for the López family, the Tabacs de Filipines building on La Rambla housed the Philippine tobacco company and the Banco Hispano Colonial. Today it is the Hotel 1898.
The Eden Théâtre in La Ciotat, where the Lumière films were shown publicly in 1895, is regarded as the world’s oldest cinema — closed in 1995, reopened after restoration in 2013.
Founded in 1903 by the Austrian confectioner Antoine Rumpelmayer, Angelina on the rue de Rivoli is the Paris tea house of the hot chocolate “l’Africain” and the Mont-Blanc.
Opened in 1862 to serve the Grand-Hôtel, the Café de la Paix faces the Palais Garnier from the Place de l’Opéra. Its Napoleon III interior has been a monument historique since 1975.
Subotica, Timișoara and Oradea built the Hungarian Secession at the same moment, in the same empire. Then the border moved, and the standard account of Art Nouveau left all three off the map.
Ouro Preto — inscribed 1980, Brazil’s first UNESCO site — is the Americas’ most complete Baroque colonial city: 13 churches funded by the 18th-century gold rush (800 tonnes of gold, 1690–1775) and the sculptures of Alejadinho, the greatest artist of colonial Latin America. His 12 soapstone prophets at Congonhas (inscribed 1985) are 1 hour south.
