1. Palmyra, Syria
Windswept, wild and vast, the roman city of Palmyra sits by an oasis under the shadow of an Arab castle. You could spend days walking among the grand arches, leaning pillars and ruined temples that line this forgotten corner of the desert without really feeling you understood the place, nor the strange tower tombs that stand in the ‘Valley of the Dead’ nearby.
2. Hagia Sofia, Istanbul, Turkey
Few buildings truly seem unqiue: however impressive a great cathedral might be, there’s always an echo of another building; the sense it follows some sort of vague pattern repeated over the world. The Hagia Sofia is at once majestic, and unlike any building in the world. Still standing nearly 1500 years after its construction, the greatest relic of Byzantium has served a church, a mosque and is now a museum.
3. Volubilis, Meknes, Morocco
Volubilis is ancient world tourism at its very best: keep-off signs, leaflets and guides are nowhere to be seen, and the few wardens that guard the site chat in the shade beneath the olive trees. One of the most distant outposts of the Roman Empire, lizards now bask on the mosaics, and birds make their nests in pillars of the capitol.
4. Herculaneum, Bay of Naples, Italy
Strolling through the streets of Ercolano, with its tidily presented cafes and humble apartment blocks, few first-time visitors could expect to stumble a gaping hole in the ground, let alone the Roman town that fits snugly inside it. Wandering around, it’s amazing to think that citizens must have ran through Herculaneum’s narrow streets, past its grand townhouses, chased by the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius and not knowing they were doomed to die at the seashore.
