Dubrovnik

For four and a half centuries the Republic of Ragusa kept her freedom with diplomacy, silver and the best walls in Europe, and the walls are still doing their job — now against the sun, for the evening crowd on the marble Stradun, polished by feet into a mirror. From the sea she looks less built than carved: one piece of limestone, complete, riding between the mountain and the Adriatic.

The sensible traveller walks the walls at opening or at five — two kilometers of rampart with the Adriatic on one side and terracotta on the other —, swims off the rocks below Lovrijenac, takes the boat to Lokrum when the lanes fill after the second cruise ship, and rides the cable car up Srđ for the hour when the roofs turn to embers. The film pilgrimages are optional; the fortress was worth the journey before television.

The Guide's honesty: the city within the walls is small and the summer ships are not — check the cruise calendar and claim the early morning —; everything inside the walls costs a captain's ransom: the locals drink their coffee one street back from the Stradun; and the war of the nineties left scars the city explains herself, in the memorial off the main street — pay it the respect of ten quiet minutes.