Dublin

Ireland's capital, a Viking trading town on a black pool that the Normans took, the English ruled from a castle for seven centuries, and the Georgians remade into a city of red-brick squares and fanlit doors. Beneath the elegant grid runs an older Dublin of two medieval cathedrals and a buried Norse waterfront; at its heart Trinity College guards the Book of Kells in the Long Room. And on its grandest boulevard the General Post Office still carries the bullet marks of the Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen, where a republic was proclaimed and a city burned. Read the layers of the city, from the black pool to the Rising, at your own pace.