As Europe starts opening up to travelers again, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art and architecture — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s an ancient favorite: The caveman man cave at Lascaux is startling for how fashionably it’s decorated. The walls are painted with animals — bears, wolves, bulls, horses, deer, and cats — and even a few animals that are now extinct, like woolly mammoths. There’s scarcely a Homo sapiens in sight, but there are human handprints. All this was done during the Stone Age nearly 20,000 years ago, in what is now southwest France. That’s about four times as old as Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids, before the advent of writing, metalworking, and farming. The caves were painted not by hulking, bushy-browed Neanderthals but by fully-formed Homo sapiens known as Cro-Magnons.
