Nazareth

"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Nathanael's question captures how the town was seen: a farming village of a few hundred people, unmentioned in the Hebrew Bible, tucked into a bowl of hills above the Jezreel Valley.

Here Gabriel came to Mary, here Jesus spent roughly thirty of his years, and here he read from Isaiah in the synagogue and was nearly thrown off the brow of the hill for it. The archaeology is modest and convincing: rock-cut houses, cisterns, wine presses and grain silos of a first-century village.

The modern city layers a great deal over that village — the vast Basilica of the Annunciation, the Greek Orthodox Church of St Gabriel at Mary's Well, a lively market and one of the best food scenes in Galilee.