Tirana

Tirana spent half a century sealed under Europe's strangest dictatorship — a country of concrete bunkers where private cars were banned — and has responded by becoming the continent's most caffeinated work in progress: façades painted in circus colors by a mayor who was a painter, seven hundred thousand espressos a day, and a skyline changing so fast the maps apologize. The energy is the attraction.

The sensible traveller starts in Skanderbeg Square with the hero on his horse, ducks into the Et'hem mosque's painted porch and the excellent Bunk'Art museums — the dictator's bunkers turned into history lessons —, lunches at the Pazari i Ri among figs and mountains of greens, spends the evening in Blloku, once reserved for party officials and now reserved for everyone with a coffee, and rides the Dajti Ekspres up the mountain for the whole improbable city at once.

The Guide's honesty: crossing the street is a dialogue, not a right — move with the locals and keep negotiating —; cash still rules the smaller tables; prices are sometimes quoted in old lek, ten times higher: clarify with a smile; and Albanian hospitality is a force of nature — decline the third raki only if you mean it, because the fourth is already poured.