Rector's Palace

This guide to the Rector's Palace in Dubrovnik starts in its stone atrium, where columns meet their capitals through hidden iron dowels packed in molten lead, a fifteenth-century trick meant to let the joints flex under load. You'll hear how the building earned its cautious engineering the hard way, surviving an accidental gunpowder explosion in 1435 and a second blast in 1463, after which the government brought in the Florentine architect Michelozzo, only to reject his designs as too fashionable for a wary republic. Local masons and the architect Salvi di Michele finished the work instead, carving new capitals with faces peering from acanthus leaves, before the earthquake of 1667 cracked the palace again. Look up at those columns as you stand in the atrium, still carrying that weight today.