A gilded Baroque column to the Virgin Mary marks the southern gateway into Graz's old town. In 1938 the National Socialist regime sheathed it in a towering propaganda obelisk to crown the city it had named 'City of the People's Uprising'.

A medieval friary church whose narrow Gothic chancel was gutted by an Allied bomb in the last winter of the war. Its tall tower still rises over the old town as a quiet witness to the destruction of 1945.

The medieval heart of Graz, framed by the grand Rathaus and the bronze Archduke Johann Fountain. In 1938 this square became a stage for Nazi mass rallies and was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

The grand artery of the old town, lined with arcaded shops and the Renaissance Landhaus, the seat of Styrian power. It also runs through the heart of what was once Graz's Jewish quarter, whose community was shattered in 1938.

A late-Gothic ducal residence begun for Friedrich III in 1438, today the seat of the Styrian provincial government. Under National Socialism the same halls of power housed the apparatus of Gauleiter Siegfried Uiberreither.

The building beside the Paulustor that housed the Graz Gestapo from 1938 to 1945, where thousands were interrogated and tortured. Today only a small plaque in the inner courtyard of the police detention centre marks what happened here.

A network of more than six kilometres of tunnels driven into the hill above you, dug from 1943 onward by prisoners of war and forced labourers to shelter Graz from Allied bombs. Today people glide through the rock in a glass lift, but the stone remembers the hands that hewed it.

The beloved clock tower crowning the Schlossberg, where the people of Graz once paid a ransom to save it from demolition. From the summit, the whole rebuilt city spreads out beneath you.