The second episode in this three-part mini-series distills Rick Steves' 30 years of travel experience into 30 minutes of practical advice on how to have a fun, affordable, and culturally broadening trip to Europe. Shot on location in Amsterdam, Germany's Rhineland, Venice, Siena, the Italian Riviera, the Swiss Alps, Paris, and London, these episodes cover Rick’s favorite 3,000-mile European loop while providing viewers with essential travel skills....

These tools are not from the modern world, but are in fact thousands of years old. Most would be lost to time and not again for centuries. How was the ancient world able to create such incredible power tools? Why were they lost?

The historic town of Mostar, spanning a deep valley of the Neretva River, developed in the 15th and 16th centuries as an Ottoman frontier town and during the Austro-Hungarian period in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mostar has long been known for its old Turkish houses and Old Bridge, Stari Most, after which it is named. In the 1990 conflict, however, most of the historic town and the Old Bridge, designed by the renowned architect Sinan, were destroyed....

Making headlines around the world, Brent Seales and his team of computer scientists set out on a mission to read the 2,000-year-old carbonized scrolls found in the remains of a villa in Herculaneum. Mt. Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD transformed the papyri, fusing together the layers of the scrolls and making them impossible to read. Can particle physics and AI finally reveal what the scrolls say?

The eruption of the Vesuvio froze the town of Pompei forever. The catastrophe led to a vast interdisciplinary project: volcanology reveals the force of the eruption, archeology and the study of texts uncover new objects of daily life found in the remains of buildings and roadways, including graffiti on the walls… But can one be sure that all of these discoveries date back to the eruption?

Ukraine, April 26, 1986. The nuclear power plant near Chernobyl is due for routine tests. The tests are to check if it can be restarted independently after a total outage of the electricity network. Foreman Anatoli Diatlov is supervising tests on reactor number 4. Confident in his equipment, Diatlov decides, against the advice of his engineers, to push the reactor tests to the limit and disables several security measures. When the team notices the...

The Vikings were an ambitious, daring and frightening people who left an indelible mark on the British psyche. Yet archaeology has revealed very little about their time in Britain and even less about what happened to them afterwards. Archaeologist Julian Richards finds new evidence about what really happened during the dramatic period when Vikings roamed the seas around Britain. And in a ground-breaking genetics research project designed specially...

This episode of Ancient Rome - The Rise and Fall of an Empire examines Julius Caesar's path to power. The general refused to disband his forces following his conquest of Gaul and waged civil war en route to becoming Rome's first emperor.Discover how the ruler of a quarter of the people on the planet took Rome to the edge of ruin.

The Arabs have been bringing knowledge of the ancient world to Europe since the 8th century. In the fields of medicine, mathematics or philosophy, their scholars were far beyond their time and still affect our world today. For a long time, the Arabs were estranged, not united by one nation or leader. They had little in common beyond a shared language. This didn’t change until Mohammed ended polytheism, founding a new religion and uniting all of...