Few European capitals wear their history so openly. On the Buda side, the Roman town of Aquincum has left an amphitheatre, streets and a museum at the edge of the modern city; on the hill above, the castle district preserves the memory of a medieval royal seat repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. The Ottoman period left thermal baths still in daily use and the tomb of a dervish among them. Then, in the nineteenth century, Buda and Pest were joined and rebuilt at speed as the second capital of a dual monarchy: the parliament on the river, the great boulevards, the chain bridge, the covered market and a continental Europe's first underground railway. The twentieth century added its own scars and its own architecture. This film follows the Danube as the spine of that story, moving between aerial views of the bridges, the domes and the Buda hills, and street-level sequences in the baths, the markets and the courtyards where the layers of the city are still visible to anyone who looks.
