History14 places
Follow Christopher Columbus from a documented family home in Genoa through the negotiations, ports and Atlantic crossings that transformed his life—and the world. This trace does not present him as the person who “discovered America”: Indigenous peoples had inhabited the Americas for millennia, and a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows predates 1492 by almost five centuries. Instead, it follows the places where Columbus’s westward project became a lasting connection between Europe and the Americas, while confronting the conquest, forced labour, enslavement and demographic catastrophe that followed. Several exact sites remain disputed; each such stop is marked as a traditional, commemorative or archaeological identification rather than a certainty.