Amsterdam

Amsterdam owes its name to a dam. Around 1270 villagers threw an earthen barrier across the Amstel river, and the settlement that grew behind it — Amstelredamme — became a port. Its great century was the 1600s. Dutch ships criss-crossed the globe, and in 1602 the Dutch East India Company sold shares to ordinary citizens on an Amsterdam bridge, creating the world's first public stock exchange. To house the boom the city dug three grand horseshoe canals — Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht — and sold the plots along them. Because houses were taxed on their width, merchants built tall, narrow and deep, tipping the facades forward so a hoist beam at the gable could haul furniture up past the cramped stairs. Those leaning brick fronts, and the hooks still bolted beneath their peaks, are the city you photograph today.

Money also bought openness. Amsterdam quietly took in people other cities expelled — Jewish families fleeing Portugal and Spain, French Protestants, freethinkers and printers — and their trade and ideas made it richer still. The painter Rembrandt van Rijn arrived a poor miller's son, grew famous, bought a fine house, then spent beyond his means and died bankrupt; his vast group portrait, The Night Watch, now anchors the Rijksmuseum.

The same tall canal houses hold darker memories. In one of them, at Prinsengracht 263, a teenager named Anne Frank hid for two years with her family from the Nazis behind a bookcase, until they were betrayed in 1944; her diary outlived her. After the war Amsterdam rebuilt itself as one of Europe's most liberal cities, where more bikes than people fill the streets and canal boats slide under some 1,500 bridges. Come evening, when the gabled houses light up and reflect in the still water, the whole Golden Age seems to float just below the surface.