England's greatest universities, Oxford and Cambridge,
have been rivals since the 1300s.
We'll visit Oxford later.
Each has the same basic heritage and design.
No main campus -- instead, the many colleges
are scattered throughout the charming town center.
By catching one of the many guided town walks,
you'll get an insider's look at an urban mix
of what locals "town and gown."
-In medieval Europe,
it was the church that was in charge of higher education,
and here in Cambridge, we have 31 colleges,
all with the same design.
You have a beautiful green court.
Set around the court are buildings
where the students eat, sleep, pray, and study.
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-Many colleges welcome the public to browse around.
At their historic front gates, you'll find a porter's lodge.
The porter delivers mail, monitors who comes and goes,
and keeps people off the grass.
Colleges have centuries of heritage,
and you feel that in their exquisite libraries.
Here in Corpus Christi's Parker Library,
that college's literary treasures
are proudly on display, such as letters from Anne Boleyn
before husband Henry VIII lopped off her head
and a first edition of Newton's groundbreaking treatise,
"Principia Mathematica."
The exclusive putting-green quality of the courtyard lawns
is a huge deal here.
Generally, only senior professors
can walk on the courts,
the centerpiece of each college campus.
One of the powerhouse colleges at Cambridge is Kings,
which has a central courtyard
to match its esteemed reputation.
The 500-year-old Kings College Chapel,
built by Henrys VI through VIII,
is England's best surviving example
of late Gothic architecture.
With its emphasis on vertical lines,
it's called Perpendicular Gothic.
This is the most impressive building in Cambridge,
with the largest single span of vaulted roof anywhere --
2,000 tons of glorious fan vaulting.
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Here, you can enjoy the most complete collection
of original 16th-century Renaissance
stained glass in existence.
With the help of this closed captioning,
handy if you can read Latin,
you can wander through the entire Bible.
And the "Adoration of the Magi,"
a masterpiece by Rubens, adorns the altar.
Trinity College, just next door,
was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII.
It's the richest and biggest in town.
Cambridge has produced nearly 100 Nobel Prize winners,
and about 1/3 of them were Trinity graduates.
The great mathematician Sir Isaac Newton,
who both studied and taught at Trinity,
famously clapped his hands and timed the echo
to calculate the speed of sound.
Huh, 1,120 feet per second or 761 miles per hour
at this altitude.
The colleges that face the Cam River
each have garden-like backyards that combine
to make the riverbank feel like a lush and exclusive park.
A beloved Cambridge tradition is a romantic and graceful glide
past these colleges in a traditional flat-bottomed punt.
Skilled locals make the ride look effortless.
-So this is Trinity College, and this is the Wren Library.
-You can hire a boat to enjoy a witty narration
by a student as you're pulled past fine college architecture.
-Yeah, these are called the "Backs," the backs of the river.
There's eight colleges along the river.
So this area is called the Backs because, quite simply,
it's the back of those colleges.
The only way you can see the backs of these colleges
is along the river, so the best way
to see the backs of all the colleges is by punting.
-Or, for a little levity and probably more exercise
than you really want, why not rent one yourself?
[ Laughter ]
The punts are tougher to maneuver than they look.
[ Chatter ]
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