Rynek Starego Miasta

This guide to Rynek Starego Miasta, Warsaw's Old Town square, opens in 1944 as Nazi troops burn the square to rubble on Hitler's direct order, destroying most of the old town's historic buildings. It asks how a seven-hundred-year-old square could still be standing today, and points to an unlikely clue held in a nearby museum: a set of panoramic paintings by the Venetian court painter Bernardo Bellotto, made in the 1770s in obsessive, window-by-window detail. Postwar architects, the guide notes, were left with almost nothing standing to measure from.