  During the last five decades, gravity, as one of the fundamental forces of
nature, has been formulated as a gauge theory of the Weyl-Cartan-Yang-Mills
type. The present text offers commentaries on the articles from the most
prominent proponents of the theory. In the early 1960s, the gauge idea was
successfully applied to the Poincar\'e group of spacetime symmetries and to the
related conserved energy-momentum and angular momentum currents. The resulting
theory, the Poincar\'e gauge theory, encompasses Einstein's general relativity
as well as the teleparallel theory of gravity as subcases. The spacetime
structure is enriched by Cartan's torsion, and the new theory can accommodate
fermionic matter and its spin in a perfectly natural way. This guided tour
starts from special relativity and leads, in its first part, to general
relativity and its gauge type extensions \`a la Weyl and Cartan. Subsequent
stopping points are the theories of Yang-Mills and Utiyama and, as a particular
vantage point, the theory of Sciama and Kibble. Later, the Poincar\'e gauge
theory and its generalizations are explored and special topics, such as its
Hamiltonian formulation and exact solutions, are studied. This guide to the
literature on classical gauge theories of gravity is intended to be a
stimulating introduction to the subject.
