Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Around 2500 BCE, Neolithic Britons hauled 25-ton sarsen stones about 15 miles (25 km) to Salisbury Plain and raised them into the trilithons and circle known as Stonehenge.

The Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was completed under Ptolemy II to guide ships into the city's Great Harbor. Commissioned by Ptolemy I and built by the architect Sostratus of Cnidus, the tower stood for over 1,600 years.

Around 220 BCE, China’s first emperor ordered the rival kingdoms’ old border walls linked into one defensive line, the earliest version of what became the Great Wall.

Mount Vesuvius threw a column of superheated ash and gas 33 km into the sky, then collapsed it into pyroclastic surges that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. The remains of more than 1,500 people have been recovered from the two towns.

Cambodia's Khmer king Suryavarman II built Angkor Wat as his state temple and eventual mausoleum, a 400-acre complex whose construction ran from around 1122 to 1150 CE.

Genoese galleys carrying plague from the Black Sea put in at Messina in Sicily, and the disease went ashore with them. Over the next seven years it killed perhaps a third of Europe - up to 50 million people - and took two centuries to be made good.

The brewhouse on Křemencova has been dated to 1499, which makes it one of the oldest continuously trading beer halls anywhere. It brews its own dark lager on the premises and has done through five centuries of changing states, serving it in a warren of rooms off a courtyard.

Venice's Baroque votive basilica, its foundations built on more than a million driven wooden piles in the lagoon mud, is consecrated by Patriarch Alvise Sagredo. The city still marks the day every November 21st as the Festa della Salute.

Floriano Francesconi opened his coffee house under the arcades of Piazza San Marco in 1720, making it one of the oldest cafés in continuous business anywhere. It admitted women when other Venetian cafés did not, which is how Casanova came to be among its regulars, and its orchestra still plays to the square.

Den Gyldene Freden opened in Stockholm's old town in 1722, named for the peace that ended the Great Northern War, and has served from the same vaulted cellars ever since - long enough to be cited as the oldest restaurant still trading in its original premises. The Swedish Academy has lunched there on Thursdays for generations.

Botín has been serving on Calle de Cuchilleros since 1725, which the Guinness Book of Records recognises as making it the oldest restaurant in the world still trading. It was founded by the French cook Jean Botín and his Asturian wife, passed to a nephew - the sobrino of the name - and still roasts suckling pig in the same wood-fired oven, which has reportedly not been allowed to go out.

Port'Alba began in 1738 as a street stall selling pizza to passers-by and took premises as a sit-down pizzeria a century later, which is the claim behind its billing as the world's first pizzeria. It still bakes in a wood oven lined with Vesuvian stone, on the street of booksellers under the old city gate.

A magnitude 7.7-or-greater earthquake struck off Cape St. Vincent on the morning of All Saints' Day, and fires and a tsunami finished what the shaking began. Between 30,000 and 40,000 died in Lisbon alone.

Antico Caffè Greco opened in 1760 a few steps from the Spanish Steps and became the room where the Grand Tour sat down - Keats, Byron, Goethe, Stendhal and Casanova among the names attached to it. It is the oldest cafe in Rome, but it lost a long court fight with its landlord over the rent: after the Court of Cassation upheld the lease termination, police sealed the premises it had occupied for more than two and a half centuries on 8 October 2025.

Demel was established in 1786 a few steps from the Hofburg and became confectioner to the imperial court, a title it still puts on its boxes. Its window on the Kohlmarkt and its Anna Torte made it one of the fixtures by which Vienna measures its café culture, and it sits at the centre of a long argument with Hotel Sacher over who may call a cake a Sachertorte.

An enduring family-run dining room for traditional Catalan cooking in the Gothic Quarter.

At the Round Foundry in Holbeck, Leeds, engineering firm Fenton, Murray and Wood built the Salamanca, the world's first commercially successful steam locomotive, which first ran publicly on 24 June 1812. Designed by Matthew Murray for John Blenkinsop's rack-and-pinion Middleton Railway, it hauled coal using a toothed rail system.

The most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history threw 37-45 cubic kilometres of rock into the atmosphere from Sumbawa. Its veil of ash cooled the planet enough to give 1816 the name the Year Without a Summer.

The bar opened in 1817 under the name La Piña de Plata, took the name Floridita later, and became the daiquiri's home address - frozen, without sugar, double rum, the way Hemingway drank them at the corner of the bar where his statue now leans.

In 1821, landowner Marco Borrini and French businessman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Henraux founded the Henraux marble company in Tuscany’s Apuan Alps. It still works the Monte Altissimo quarries first opened by Michelangelo in the 1500s and shown in Stone Men.

The oldest restaurant still operating in the United States opened on 7 October 1826 as the Atwood & Bacon Oyster House, in a Union Street building already old at the time. Its semicircular oyster bar is the original, and Daniel Webster is said to have worked through brandy and oysters at it daily.

Jonathan Dodgson Carr founds a small bakery and biscuit factory in Carlisle, pioneering mass biscuit production. The site is still operating today as a McVitie's factory, the world's oldest continually-running biscuit works.

Café Kranzler opened on Unter den Linden in 1834 and became the Berlin coffeehouse. Destroyed in the war, it was rebuilt on the Kurfürstendamm, where its red-and-white striped rotunda survives as a listed landmark of West Berlin's reconstruction.

Antoine Alciatore opened his restaurant on 3 April 1840 in the French Quarter, and it has been run by his descendants ever since - the oldest family-run restaurant in the United States. Oysters Rockefeller were invented in its kitchen, and the recipe has never been published.

The Bewley family began dealing tea in Dublin in 1840, having broken the East India Company's grip on the trade by shipping direct from China, and the cafés followed. The Grafton Street room, with its Harry Clarke windows and open fires, became the city's front parlour.

On April 16, 1853, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway ran the first passenger train in India and Asia, carrying about 400 guests roughly 34km from Bombay's Bori Bunder to Thane.

With more than 500 dead in ten days around Golden Square, John Snow persuaded the parish to remove the handle from the Broad Street water pump. He had mapped the deaths house by house and found them clustered on one well - the argument that cholera travelled in water, not air.

Washington's oldest saloon dates itself to 1856 and has moved premises more than once, ending up a block from the White House. Its oyster bar and dark wood booths have fed enough administrations that the taxidermy over the bar is said to have been shot by Theodore Roosevelt.

Café Tortoni first opened in 1858, started by a French immigrant who named it after a Paris cafe, and became the room where Buenos Aires argued about itself - Borges, Gardel and Rubinstein among the regulars whose likenesses now sit at its tables. It still trades on Avenida de Mayo with its original marble, mirrors and tango cellar.

The coffeehouse on Vörösmarty tér opened in 1858 and grew into one of the largest and grandest in Europe, its rooms panelled and chandeliered on a scale that belongs to the Habsburg city. It gave its name to the Gerbeaud slice and remains the fixture by which Budapest's café tradition is measured.