Geneva

Genève. The Red Cross was founded here. The UN convenes here. The Geneva Conventions carry the city's name, and so does the sense that somewhere, quietly, the world's conscience is being managed from a small Swiss city between a lake and the Alps.

And yet the paradox lives in the same cobblestones. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva's most celebrated philosopher, preached the natural goodness of man while abandoning his five children to an orphanage. John Calvin, whose reformed theology radiated from St Pierre Cathedral across Protestant Europe, had the humanist Michael Servetus burned at the stake on the edge of town.

Without a knowledgeable voice in your ear, the evidence stays hidden: the hall where nations first signed the Geneva Convention, unmarked; the Escalade fountain, unexplained; the Yes-No sculpture, silent.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours carry 2,000 years of this through the Old Town and into Carouge – the neighbourhood Genevans call their Little Italy, where Voltaire staged his first play in a wooden shed. Plug in your earbuds and let Geneva account for itself.