Wandering the streets of Riga's Old Town, circling the famous Freedom Monument, visiting the rural holiday homes of the Russian Politburo, I struggled to recall a visit to any region that had been quite so conditioned by its history.
In 1913, Tunis Bergen, a physician chairing the Holland Society's committee investigating options for a monument, visited the Netherlands and enquired whether a copy of the Royer's statue in the Hague could be made and took measurements and photographs of the work.
One of the most beautiful structural compositions in the world, the Taj Mahal is also one of the world's most iconic monuments, visited by millions of tourists each year.
For more information on the west bank monuments, visit thebanmappingproject.com.
Built in 1889, the monument is visited by seven million people yearly.
Visitors can climb the monument and visit the museum from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
New monuments to visit might be one way to lure tourists.
On one of my traipsings round these metropolitan monuments, I visited St Barnabas's Church in Addison Road, between Holland Park Avenue and Kensington High Street.
As we passed the city's 2,000-year-old 2,000-year-old 2,000-year-oldinternational tourists, the snap-happy domonumentsavellerseldomoard beamed.
Despite or perhaps because of its historic import, the Neck is largely untrammeled, its monuments scarcely visited, the rural two-lane Historyland Highway bisecting it empty of traffic as often as not.
