One hundred years after Antoni Gaudi's death, the Sagrada Familia has become the tallest church in the world. Here is what has changed, what remains unfinished, and everything a visitor needs to know to experience Barcelona's basilica in this historic year.
For centuries, Europe’s most prized blue came chiefly from lapis lazuli mined in Badakhshan. At times, the finest ultramarine cost more than gold and was reserved for the most sacred figures in painting. Then nineteenth-century chemistry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday pigment.
Thirty-three metres beneath a hill in Picardy lies a city carved by hand: 28 galleries, hundreds of rooms, chimneys disguised to hide the smoke. Villagers dug in here to survive centuries of war. Then, in 1916, soldiers on leave came down as tourists and wrote their names on the chalk. Thousands are still legible.
For roughly three years, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were active in Renaissance Rome at the same time. They were not friends: admiration, influence, rivalry, and resentment shaped their relationships. Leonardo and Michelangelo had already crossed paths in Florence, and Raphael had studied both. Although no reliable source records all three gathering together, their artistic dialogue stretched from Florence to the Vatican.
The United States Constitution never uses the word "slave", yet it protected slavery in at least three places. Why did a generation that proclaimed all men equal write human bondage into its founding charter, who fought to stop them, and would the nation have split apart if they had chosen abolition instead?
She was born in a palace but lived as a hostage. Stripped of her homeland, forced into exile, and erased from history — discover the heartbreaking true story of Deokhye, the last princess of Korea.
In 1917, a battle-hardened peasant woman, who had become a commander, formed the first battalion of women in the Russian army, intended to restore discipline to an army whose soldiers were deserting en masse
A portrait of Pachacutec, the Inca strategist, builder, and reformer who forged the Tahuantinsuyo, the largest empire in pre-Columbian America
How a private Brussels mansion became a radical manifesto of Vienna Secession design and a tightly guarded World Heritage landmark.
