The Kamondo Stairs in Istanbul's Galata district look like an architect got carried away. Their Neo-Baroque curves spiral upward from Bankalar Caddesi in two sweeping arcs, and the design wasn't purely decorative: Abraham Salomon Camondo had them built around 1870 so his grandchildren could walk safely downhill to school without tumbling to the bottom.

Camondo was a figure of extraordinary reach. His family had fled Spain for Venice after the Inquisition, then moved to Istanbul, where Abraham became the Ottoman Empire's prime banker and helped finance the Crimean War. He died a count, buried in Istanbul by his own wish. His descendants settled in Paris, and the last of them were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours connect these stairs to Galata's cosmopolitan past, tracing the Jewish, Genoese, and banking dynasties that shaped this quarter and explaining why Henri Cartier-Bresson once stopped here to take a photograph.