The Royal Palace on Dam Square was never meant to be a palace. Completed in 1665, it was Amsterdam's Town Hall, and at the time of its completion it was the largest secular building in the world. The city's Golden Age merchants weren't being modest: the entire structure, from its tympanum crowded with sea gods and city maidens to the weather vane on top of the dome, was designed to announce that Amsterdam had become the new Rome.

Then Napoleon arrived. In 1808, his brother Louis took over the building as a royal residence, and what the citizens had built as a monument to their own democratic power became a palace in the conventional sense. The Dutch royal family still uses it today for official occasions.

VoiceMap's tours use the palace to trace Amsterdam's astonishing rise: from a dam in a minor river to the economic capital of the world, with the building's rooftop statues, marble mosaics and Golden Age symbolism serving as the evidence.