In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on parchment traditionally described as gazelle skin, it showed the Atlant...
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In the old medina of Fez, behind carved doors and walls that have witnessed more than a millennium of Moroccan history, books have survived dynasties, wars, political upheavals and the arriv...
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Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
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Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
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There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
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Few subjects can turn an ordinary Italian lunch into a tribunal quite as quickly as a traditional recipe. Put cream in carbonara, use pancetta instead of guanciale, add garlic where somebody...
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Imagine a town where your daily commute doesn’t involve traffic lights—but a bush plane. In remote corners of Alaska and the U.S., several communities exist without any road access. One of t...
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Rising from a sea of mist in central Italy is Civita di Bagnoregio, a medieval village perched on top of a crumbling volcanic cliff. Often called “The Dying Town,” Civita seems straight out...
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Perched off the coast of Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel is one of the most surreal places in Europe. At first glance, it looks like a medieval village rising out of the sea — complete with an a...
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In one of the darkest and most bizarre moments in church history, Pope Stephen VI staged a trial — not of a living man, but of a rotting corpse. The accused? His predecessor, Pope Formosu...
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