The Corinthian Canal

Once upon a time, there were only two ways to get a boat across the isthmus of Corinth. The first was to get out of your boat and wheel the thing across the land over a road called the diolkos, a paved road made by the tyrants of Corinth, or to sail all the way around the Peloponnese. Efforts to dig a canal across the isthmus have been talked about since the seventh century B.C. and began as early as the reign of Nero, but the canal itself was not actually made until the late 1800s, due to the technical difficulty and cost associated with such an undertaking. These days the canal isn't used for many ships- it is very narrow, after all- but it's still there and still pretty cool to look at.