The equestrian statue standing in Amalienborg's courtyard cost more to build than all four palaces around it combined. That tells you something about King Frederik the Fifth, who commissioned it, reigned over a golden age, and drank himself to death at 42.

Amalienborg is the Danish royal family's Copenhagen home: four near-identical Rococo mansions arranged around an octagonal square. They were never meant for royals. Built in the 1750s for noble families, they became palaces only after a fire gutted Christiansborg in 1794 and left the king homeless.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reconstruct the tense morning of April the ninth, 1940, hour by hour, when King Christian the Tenth refused to flee the advancing Germans and ordered his troops to hold the square. They trace how a district built for nobility, Frederik's Town, came to revolve around this royal heart.