Bucharest

Bucharest was once called the little Paris of the East, then the twentieth century happened to her twice — once in concrete, once in revolution — and what remains is stranger and more interesting than the nickname: Belle Époque palaces beside socialist blocks, garden villas behind boulevards built for parades, and the second-largest administrative building on Earth glowering over it all like a paperweight on the city's history.

The sensible traveller tours the Palace of Parliament once — the numbers, a million cubic meters of marble and chandeliers by the ton, explain Romania's eighties better than any museum —, then takes the antidote in the Athenaeum's velvet rotunda, a concert if the calendar allows; walks the Calea Victoriei end to end; gives the evening to Lipscani's revived lanes; and saves a slow morning for the Village Museum in Herăstrău, where whole wooden churches have emigrated into a park.

The Guide's honesty: the old town's night economy is enthusiastic and occasionally predatory — choose the terrace whose menu prints prices —; crosswalks are a negotiation: make eye contact, then commit; the metro is quick and the traffic above it is not; and Ceaușescu's palace requires a passport for entry and a sense of irony for exit. Both are worth carrying.