It's not your typical library, memorial, or book store.

This stretch of beach along California's central coast is a busy highway for the largest seal in the northern hemisphere.

The unbelievably opulent home built for an infamous newspaperman.

A lover's walk between hilltop towns, decorated with graffiti love notes.

This iconic Parisian bookstore doubles as the "Tumbleweed Hotel" for traveling writers.

An "inside out" building in the historical center of Paris, featuring Europe’s largest modern art museum.

Thanks to an acoustic anomaly, this unassuming stone bench has heard one hundred years of secrets.

A walk-in working camera obscura produces 360-degree live images of the San Francisco coast.

A statue commemorate Tommie Smith and John Carlos's brave protest at the 1968 Olympics, a watershed moment for civil rights.

Five candy-colored villages on the Italian Riviera.

Housed in a memorial lighthouse, this museum relays the history of surfing, beginning with the antics of royal Hawaiian teenagers.

Gigantic Romanian salt mines used to heal respiratory conditions.

This snug medieval lane is one of the narrowest streets in the world.

Around 100,000 bodies are buried below the medieval headstones, many of which mark graves with multiple bodies stacked up to 12 deep.

A working model of the entire San Francisco Bay and much of the Sacramento River Delta, complete with regular tides that change every 14 minutes.

Concrete strongholds stand guard over the Golden Gate.

A living time capsule of the 1960s Richardson Bay water-front.

An vast warehouse of everyday treasures in Berkeley, CA.

The century-old bell and clock tower at UC Berkeley is the third-tallest in the world, and has fossils.

The Laureates here get something even more coveted than a Nobel Prize: free parking for life.

Elevated freight railway turned wildly successful urban park.

A vast city of the dead, where the deceased outnumber the living by more than a million.

The graffiti-covered remnants of a former triangulation station are balanced precariously on this California peak.

A 1920s speakeasy that had rum runners racing up and down the shores of California.