A composer’s salon, a king’s summer palace, and a city rebuilt from an eighteenth-century painter’s canvas.

Warsaw began as a modest stronghold of the Dukes of Masovia, gaining real significance only when Sigismund III Vasa moved the Polish royal court here from Kraków in 1596, drawn by its more central position within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Royal Castle became the seat of Polish monarchs for two centuries afterward, while King Jan III Sobieski, who broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, built Wilanów Palace outside the city as his own Baroque summer retreat — one of the few royal residences to escape the destruction that would later consume nearly everything else.

The Second World War treated Warsaw as harshly as any European capital: German forces first devastated the city in 1939 and again, far more systematically, after the failed 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when Hitler ordered the city razed on principle — roughly 85 percent of Warsaw, and nearly all of its historic Old Town, lay in ruins by early 1945. The postwar reconstruction that followed is now the Old Town’s own claim to UNESCO World Heritage status: rebuilders leaned heavily on the meticulously detailed eighteenth-century cityscapes painted by Bernardo Bellotto, whose canvases preserved façades, proportions and even shop signs precisely enough to guide brick-by-brick reconstruction decades later. The Cold War added its own, more contested monument: the Palace of Culture and Science, a 1955 “gift” from the Soviet Union that remains the country’s tallest building and one of its most argued-over, while a quieter history of the same period now sits at the Museum of Life Under Communism, among the ordinary domestic objects it still holds.