Europe: Architectural Highlights

Europe is home to some of the world’s greatest cathedrals, palaces, and castles. You can marvel at the diversity of gargoyles and sparkling rose windows on Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, gape at Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpture and Bernini’s towering altar canopy in Rome’s St. Peter’s, and admire many creations of medieval masonry or Renaissance engineering in between.

- Chartres Cathedral (Beyond Paris): Chartres Cathedral is a study in formal Gothic, from its 27,000 square feet of stained glass to its soaring spires and flying buttresses.

- Salisbury Cathedral (Beyond London): Britain’s answer to Chartres is Salisbury Cathedral, spiking the English countryside with one of the medieval world’s tallest spires.

- St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice): The multiple domes, swooping pointed archways, and glittering mosaics swathing St. Mark’s Basilica hint at how this great trading power of the Middle Ages sat at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures; it’s as much Byzantine as it is European.

- The Duomo (Florence): When the Renaissance genius Brunelleschi invented a noble dome to cap Florence’s Duomo, Europe’s architectural landscape changed forever. Domes started sprouting up all over the place. Visit Florence’s original, and you can clamber up narrow staircases between the dome’s onion layers to see just how Brunelleschi performed his engineering feat — and get a sweeping panorama of the city from the top.

- Residenz Palace and Schloss Nymphenburg (Munich): In the 17th and 18th centuries, powerful kings governing much of Europe felt they ruled by divine right — and built palaces to prove it. The Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty ruled for 738 years from Munich’s Residenz Palace and the pleasure palace outside town, Schloss Nymphenburg.

- Hofburg Palace (Vienna): The Hapsburg emperors set up housekeeping in the sprawling Hofburg Palace, where the chapel is now home to a little singing group known as the Vienna Boy’s Choir, and where museums showcase everything from classical statuary and musical instruments to medieval weaponry and the imperial treasury.

- Buckingham Palace (London): You can line up to watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and even tour the royal pad, assuming Her Majesty Elizabeth II isn’t at home.

- Versailles (Beyond Paris): You can ride the RER train from downtown Paris to the palace to end all palaces, Versailles, where Louis XIV held court, Marie Antoinette kept dangerously out of touch with her subjects (who were brewing revolution back in Paris), and the Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending World War I.

- Neuschwanstein (Beyond Munich): Tourists aren’t the only ones looking to recapture a romantic, idealized past. Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria was so enamored by his country’s fairy-tale image that he decided to build Neuschwanstein in the foothills of the Alps south of Munich. This fanciful 19th-century version of what Ludwig thought a medieval castle should look like is a festival of turrets and snapping banners that later inspired Uncle Walt’s Cinderella castle in Disney World.

- Sagrada Famiglia (Barcelona): Lest you think the architectural innovations are all relics of the past, head to Barcelona, where one of the early 20th centuries’ greatest architects, Antoni Gaudí, used his own unique riff on Art Nouveau to design everything from apartment blocks to a cathedral-size church, Sagrada Famiglia, still under construction.