Hoher Markt, Vienna

This guide to Hoher Markt in Vienna opens in the last cold weeks of winter, 180 AD, when a Roman army camp stood on this ground and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher on the throne who filled campaign nights with the notebooks now called the Meditations, lay dying in a tent. For centuries no one could confirm it happened here, until workers laying pipes in 1948 broke into the buried stone quarters of Roman officers beneath the square, which you can still climb down into. Above the square hangs the Ankeruhr, a gilded Art Nouveau clock built for an insurance company by the painter Franz Matsch, its figures sliding across the face hour by hour.