Ancient streets, fortified walls and vibrant markets: the world's most historic urban centres, their enduring legacies and their transformations over time.
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The old city of Mostar is organised around a single arch of stone thrown across the Neretva in the sixteenth century, destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt using traditional methods. Reopened in 2004, the bridge and its quarter are inscribed on the World Heritage List.
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Walls, bastions and a fortress on the hill protect a colonial city of balconies, plazas and churches. Cartagena de Indias, inscribed on the World Heritage List, is filmed as port, stronghold and living town.
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From the castle above the Vltava to the Charles Bridge and the Old Town Square, Prague offers a thousand years of European architecture in a single walk. A World Heritage centre.
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Set high in the Andes, Quito's historic core is one of the first sites ever inscribed on the World Heritage List. Part one follows its squares, churches and monumental architecture.
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Part two leaves the great squares for the working city: stepped streets, markets, workshops, festivals and the neighbourhoods that keep Quito's historic centre inhabited.
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Divided between the upper town of the rulers and the lower town of the merchants, Tallinn's old quarter preserves one of the most complete medieval townscapes in northern Europe.
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Round towers with red conical roofs, wall-walks and fortified gates: Tallinn's medieval enceinte survives in exceptional measure and still frames the city it once protected.
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Vannes has kept what most French towns lost: an almost complete circuit of ramparts, a dense medieval core of timber-framed houses, and a cathedral at its centre. The old town of the Breton dukes remains legible street by street.
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Built inland and out of sight of the sea, the Chora of Amorgos is a compact maze of whitewashed houses and chapels beneath a rock crowned by a fortress, with a line of stone windmills standing on the ridge above.
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Unusually well watered for a Cycladic island, Andros combines terraced valleys and running streams with a maritime history written into its mansions, its museums and the stone paths that cross it.
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Perched on the rim of a sheer cliff, the Chora of Folegandros is built around a Kastro quarter whose outer houses form a continuous defensive wall. Below the squares, the sea drops away without transition.
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Budapest can be read as a section through Central European history: a Roman provincial town, a medieval royal seat, an Ottoman frontier city, then the imperial capital whose boulevards, bridges and baths still define it.
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Around Fatahillah Square, the old town of Jakarta preserves the colonial city of Batavia: Dutch administrative buildings, warehouses, a drawbridge and canals, now surrounded by one of Asia's largest urban regions.
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Acre is one of the rare places where a medieval city survives almost intact beneath a later one. Below the Ottoman streets and mosques of the walled town lie the vaulted halls of the Crusader capital, rediscovered and excavated over the last century.
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At the foot of an ancient tell, the excavated centre of Scythopolis spreads over several hectares: paved streets lined with columns, a large theatre, bath complexes and public fountains, left as an eighth-century earthquake brought them down.
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Tel Aviv holds one of the largest concentrations of International Style architecture in the world. Balconies, ribbon windows, curved corners and raised pilotis form a coherent modernist city, recognised as a World Heritage site.
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Overlooking the Negev, Tel Be'er Sheva preserves the plan of an Iron Age town built to a deliberate design: a ring of houses inside the wall, a gate, storehouses and a remarkable underground water system. It belongs to the World Heritage Biblical Tels.
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On Sardinia's western coast, Bosa rises in tiers of pastel houses above the Temo, the island's only navigable river. The medieval Malaspina castle crowns the hill, while a long row of former tanneries lines the far bank.
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Carloforte is the only town on the island of San Pietro, founded in the eighteenth century by Ligurian families who had long lived on the Tunisian island of Tabarka. Its pastel waterfront, its dialect and its tuna traditions set it apart from Sardinia.
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No city has been more filmed and fewer are better understood. This first part looks at how Venice came to exist: a settlement on the islands of a lagoon, built on forests of wooden piles, whose geography dictated its architecture and its power.
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The second part turns to the Serenissima: the republic that ruled the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, and the palaces, churches and public buildings in which its wealth, its institutions and its taste took visible form.
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The third part leaves the main routes for the quieter Venice: working canals, neighbourhood squares, artisans' workshops and the lagoon islands — together with the pressures of high water, depopulation and mass tourism that the city faces today.
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In the hills behind Senigallia, Corinaldo is still enclosed by its brick walls, towers and gates. Inside, a long stairway climbs the slope past the well of the Polenta, subject of the town's best-known legend, towards squares and churches.
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Orgosolo sits high in the Barbagia, the mountainous interior of Sardinia. Since the 1960s its houses have been covered with murals — hundreds of painted walls addressing land, labour, war and island identity, turning ordinary streets into an open-air gallery.
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San Leo stands on a sheer block of rock in the Montefeltro, reached by a single road cut into the cliff. Below the fortress lie two of the region's great early churches, while the citadel is remembered as the prison of the adventurer Cagliostro.
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Perched on a hilltop in the centre of Malta, Mdina was the island's capital for centuries. Enclosed by bastions, its narrow shaded lanes, noble palaces and cathedral have earned it the name of the Silent City.
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Below the slopes of Mount Rumija, the old town of Bar was abandoned after conflict and lies in ruins. Churches, a mosque, an aqueduct and a clock tower record the successive powers that ruled this stretch of the Adriatic.
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On the Bay of Kotor, the island of Saint George faces its celebrated neighbour offshore from Perast, a town of Baroque palaces built by sea captains. Nearby Risan preserves Roman mosaics from a much older settlement.
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The Ohrid region, in North Macedonia, is inscribed on the World Heritage List for both its natural and its cultural value. This second film continues the exploration of its churches, monasteries, fortress and shoreline.
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Skopje carries its history in visibly distinct layers: an Ottoman quarter of bazaar, hammams and caravanserais, a stone bridge over the Vardar, a modernist city rebuilt after a devastating earthquake, and a recent monumental building campaign.
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First part of a portrait of historic Lisbon. From the hillside alleys of the Alfama to the grid of the Baixa laid out after the earthquake of 1755, the film follows a city shaped by the Tagus, by trade and by catastrophe.
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Second part of the Lisbon portrait. The film continues through the great riverside squares, the hillside quarters and the churches, palaces and tiled facades that give the Portuguese capital its distinctive texture.
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Košice grew rich on trade routes, and its old town shows it: a long spindle-shaped square lined with palaces and churches, dominated by St Elisabeth's Cathedral, the largest church in Slovakia.
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Founded as the capital of the Lan Na kingdom, Chiang Mai's old city remains a perfect square defined by moat and brick walls. Inside, dozens of temples share the grid with markets, workshops and daily life.
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Antalya holds the Mediterranean coast of Turkey where the Taurus Mountains meet the sea. Its old quarter, Kaleiçi, wraps around a Roman harbour and preserves in a few hundred metres the marks of Rome, Byzantium, the Seljuks and the Ottomans.
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