Those look beautiful! As an American I do not live in a place with a rich or long cultural history, so I always looked on Europe as being pretty amazing with super old and quaint old towns and city centers everywhere. I've never really though that it was supposed to have even MORE of that. It just seemed like it was already so good to begin with, how could it be better?

That being said, do you still think it would look like that more or less, if WWII and all the bombing associated with it had not happened? New York City has had some really beautiful "old" buildings like Penn Station which got rebuilt into this cramped place with fast food restaurants. They were going to do the same thing with Grand Central Terminal but there was a movement to save it which thankfully succeeded.

I guess what I am saying is that Europeans may be good at preserving their physical/architectural history because they are conscious that much of it was destroyed by wars. I wonder if the excitement of industrialization, building modern roads, buildings public transit systems would have allowed people to demolish some of these old buildings in the favor of the new? Either way, that would still be better than them getting bombed. What do you all think?