A capital of iron and glass, chocolate and beer, comic strips and a continent’s parliament.

Brussels began as a tenth-century fortified settlement on an island in the River Senne, chosen for a crossing point on the trade route between Cologne and the Flemish cloth towns of Bruges and Ghent. It rose through the Middle Ages as the seat of the Dukes of Brabant, and the Grand-Place took its present, gilded form largely after 1695, when French bombardment under Louis XIV reduced much of the medieval square to rubble and the city’s powerful guilds rebuilt their halls within a few remarkable years, in a mixture of Flemish, Baroque and Louis XIV styles that still stands today. Belgian independence followed in 1830, and Brussels became the capital of the new kingdom — the same era that gave it its most photographed curiosity: the Manneken Pis, a small bronze fountain-statue of a boy relieving himself, first documented in the early 1600s and now dressed, several times a month, in one of several hundred costumes donated by visiting delegations from around the world.

The Senne itself all but disappeared from view in the 1870s, culverted and built over to relieve the disease and flooding it caused, a decision that quietly reshaped the modern city’s streets above it. The twentieth century then gave Brussels its two defining new identities. The 1958 World’s Fair produced the Atomium, an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times that was meant to stand for a matter of months and has instead become the city’s enduring symbol. And in the decades after the Second World War, Brussels became host to the headquarters of the European Economic Community and later the European Union, along with NATO — an accident of postwar diplomacy and geography that turned a bilingual, French- and Dutch-speaking capital of a comparatively small kingdom into the de facto capital of a continent, its European Quarter of glass towers now standing only a short walk from the seventeenth-century guild halls it grew up beside.