Belgrade

Belgrade has been demolished and rebuilt some forty times, which explains both her architecture — a scrapbook of empires, Ottoman fragments and Habsburg façades and socialist concrete — and her temperament: a city that has decided, on the evidence, that tonight matters more than tomorrow. She sits at the meeting of two great rivers with a fortress on the point, watching the Sava hand itself to the Danube like a debt being settled.

The sensible traveller walks Knez Mihailova end to end with the evening crowd, takes the Kalemegdan fortress for sunset over the confluence — the whole city gathers there, and the price is zero —, dines in Skadarlija where the tamburaši play at the table until sentiment wins, and crosses to Zemun for fish on the Danube quay, in what still feels like a Habsburg river town that never fully joined the capital.

The Guide's honesty: Belgrade's nightlife is a professional league — the splavovi, the river barges, run until sunrise and take no prisoners: pace yourself like a local, eat first, schedule nothing early —; taxis are honest when called by app and creative when hailed at the station; and the kafana is not a restaurant but an institution of assisted melancholy: order the plate of the day and let the music do its work.