Potsdamer Platz

Before World War II, Potsdamer Platz was one of the busiest intersections in Europe, the place where Berlin installed what is often called the continent's first traffic light. The war flattened it, and the Berlin Wall then ran straight through the empty space for 28 years. Almost everything you see today was built in the 1990s on what was, for a while, the largest construction site on the continent.

That history explains why the square looks the way it does: corporate, glassy and unapologetically new. The Sony Center sits under a tented roof, with towers by Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn around it, plus cinemas, a shopping arcade and the theater that hosts the Berlinale, Berlin's international film festival, every February.

A few original segments of the Wall stand on the square itself, and the line of the border is marked in the pavement by a double row of cobblestones that runs for miles across the inner city. Following that line for a few blocks gives you a better sense of the division than any single monument does.

The station of the same name serves S-Bahn, U-Bahn and regional trains, making this one of the simplest points in Berlin to reach. The Tiergarten starts across the street, and the Kulturforum, with the Gemäldegalerie and the Berliner Philharmonie, is next door. The covered arcades also make Potsdamer Platz a dependable fallback on a rainy afternoon.