History

Rising to a height of 49 feet from the center of Lanzarote — fourth largest of Spain's Canary Islands — is a unique sculpture that is part of the island's Casa-Museo del Campesino y Monumento a la Fecundidad (House-Museum of the Farmer and the Monument to Fertility). Attractions include a museum of local handcrafts and a restaurant inside an underground volcanic cave.

In Ferrara, northern Italy, more than 200 Jewish artifacts and documents from the Roman, Renaissance and modern periods are displayed at Museo Nazionale dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah (Via Piangipane 81; phone +39 0532 769137, www.meisweb.it/en).

Commemorating over 2,000 years of Jewish history and practice in Italy, up to the Shoah (Holocaust), the museum is housed in a former prison, near the Medieval Jewish ghetto, that housed Jews and political dissidents during WWII. Multimedia installations are included.

12 days, 11 nights, Aug. 23-Sept. 3, 2021. Highlights: In Warsaw, Old Town, Museum of Polish History/in Lublin, Majdanek concentration camp/in Kraków, 16th-century Flemish tapestries in Wawel Royal Castle, Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory museums/sites of Ausch witz, Birkenau/Black Madonna of Częstochowa/in Gdansk, Museum of the Second World War/Wolf’s Lair at Kętrzyn/symbolic cemetery at Treblinka. $3,600 ppdo. Single supp., $800. Valor Tours (Sausalito, CA; 800/842-4504, www.valortours.com).

The structure shown in our April 2020 mystery photo is something that is seen by virtually everyone visiting Ashgabat, the capital of the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan. Sometimes referred to as “The Plunger,” the Monument to the Independence of Turkmenistan is 299 feet tall. Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov, who ruled the country until his death in December 2006, ordered the monument's construction, which began in August 2006. (The country's date of independence was Oct. 27, 1991.)