Here at Google Sightseeing we’ve previously featured photos of buildings which appear to be leaning towards each other due to the angle of the photo. However, Madrid’s Kio Towers actually do lean towards each other, here’s a ground level pic if you don’t believe me.

Each at 15 degrees from the vertical, they were the first inclined skyscrapers in the world and due to the gateway-like appearance are also known as the “Puerta de Europa”.

Thanks: steve, Jon, Coquevas & Kalimero

Nice large type here on the roof of Fuller’s Brewery in London. Fuller, Smith and Turner PLC are famous for their award-winning beers and ales which are brewed in this, the oldest brewery in London. There’s a been a brewery here for over 350 years, and Fuller’s brewery is also famous for having the oldest wisteria in the UK, a plant which has been growing there for 186 years!

Thanks to Giles Turnbull

This is a Train à Grande Vitesse or TGV (literally meaning ‘high-speed train’), presumably travelling from Marseille to Paris. 17 years younger than Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train system, the more modern TGV has travelled faster than any other commercially-operating conventional train – under test conditions it has achieved 320.2 miles per hour.

Instead of line-side signals the TGV uses TVM (Transmission Voie-Machine), where information is transmitted to the trains via electrical pulses through the rails (giving signals directly through the train dashboard), as the trains travel far too fast to be sure of seeing signs whizzing past them.

Thanks to Guillaume for this one.

There’s absolutely loads of sightseeing to be done in Rome, but today we’re just going to be visiting the Circus Maximus… actually, there’s so much history in Rome that it’s nearly impossible to see just one thing.

Close to the previously posted Colosseum, today the Circus Maximus is just a long strip of grassy land, but it was once the greatest stadium anywhere in the world. This is where the first ever Roman Games were held, and later (when Julius Caesar expanded the Circus around 50 BC), it became 600 metres long, 225 metres wide and could accommodate an estimated 150,000 seated spectators! (For the record, that’s 3 times more than the Colosseum, and even if you compared the Circus to the largest of today’s seated stadiums, it would still rank number 7!)

Just beside the Circus on Palatine hill you can see the arches of the Imperial Palace (here’s a photo for comparison), which the emperor Domitian connected to the circus so that he could get a better view.

The most popular event at the Circus was chariot racing, where up to 12 would compete at a time. They raced the length of the track around a raised central divider known as the ’spina’ (which is still visible in the image), upon which various statues of the gods were erected. Emporor Augustus also erected an Egyptian obelisk on the spina which, in the 16th Century, was moved to the Piazza del Popolo where it still stands today.

While we’re in the Piazza del Popolo it’s worth pointing out the spectacular twin churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto (and there’s a good ground level shot here so you can see just how similar they are).

Right, that’s your history lesson over for today (hopefully as concise as possible – history lessons always put me to sleep at school), but there’s an wealth of stuff I haven’t mentioned, so I’d recommend having a look at the Wikipedia pages on the Circus Maximus and Palatine hill.

Thanks to Erin, Clint and Frank Castle for submitting the Circus Maximus and prompting me to investigate further.

Apologies to those of you who subscribe to our comments RSS feed, which has today be plagued by a rather nasty onset of comment spam. We’ve cleaned it all out and tightened up our filtering so, fingers crossed, things should be back to normal again.