São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in the Americas' southern half and behaves like it — twelve million people in the municipality alone, a skyline without edges, the world's busiest helicopter sky above the world's slowest traffic. It began in 1554 as a Jesuit school on a hill and grew on coffee, then on everyone: Italians in Bixiga, Japanese in Liberdade — the largest community outside Japan —, Lebanese, Portuguese, Northeasterners, and lately half the continent. What it lacks in beach and postcard it repays in the two things it does better than any city on the continent: art and the table.

The traveller starts on the Avenida Paulista on a Sunday, when the avenue closes to cars and MASP — Lina Bo Bardi's museum, a glass box floating on four red pillars — opens its collection; walks the Centro for the Theatro Municipal, the Martinelli and Niemeyer's wave-shaped Copan; eats a mortadella sandwich at the Mercadão; gives an afternoon to Ibirapuera Park, Niemeyer's pavilions among the trees; sees the murals of the Beco do Batman in Vila Madalena and stays for the night; and closes, as the city does, with pizza — the paulistano's Sunday religion.

The Guide's honesty: São Paulo is a working city that shows itself slowly and to those who eat well; the distances are real, so choose a neighborhood and let the metro do the rest; big-city care applies — phone in the pocket, taxi by app at night —; the drizzle that gave the city its old nickname, terra da garoa, is now mostly a memory, and the summer storms are not; and the Bienal, in even-numbered years, is worth planning a trip around.