Berlin is something of a weather-vane of modern European history, yet its rise to national prominence was a long and slow process. Founded in the thirteenth century, it is little more than a third of the age of Cologne or Augsburg. It did not achieve the early growth and economic development of other medieval foundations, such as Hamburg, Lübeck, Frankfurt or Nürnberg; it was not even the capital of a substantial feudal duchy, as Munich and Stuttgart were. Instead, it belatedly became the capital of Brandenburg , a marshland territory at the very eastern extremity of the Holy Roman Empire. This province was founded as a Margravate, or frontier district, by Albert the Bear (Albrecht der Bär) in 1157 from land bequeathed to him by Pribislav-Heinrich, a Slav king who had converted to Christianity.

TOULOUSE , with its beautiful historic centre, is one of the most vibrant and metropolitan provincial cities in France. This is a transformation that has come about since the war, under the guidance of the French state, which has poured in money to make Toulouse the think-tank of high-tech industry and a sort of premier trans-national Euroville. Always an aviation centre - St-Exupéry and Mermoz flew out from here on their pioneering airmail flights over Africa and the Atlantic in the 1920s - Toulouse is now home to Aérospatiale, the driving force behind Concorde, Airbus and the Ariane space rocket. The national Space Centre, the European shuttle programme, the leading aeronautical schools, the frontier-pushing electronics industry... it's all happening in Toulouse, whose 110,000 students make it second only to Paris as a university centre. But it's not to the burgeoning suburbs of factories, labs, shopping and housing complexes that all these people go for their entertainment, but to the old Ville Rose - pink not only in its brickwork, but also in its politics.

  The most renowned and populated city in France after Paris, MARSEILLE has - like the capital - prospered and been ransacked over the centuries. It has lost its privileges to sundry French kings and foreign armies, recovered its fortunes, suffered plagues, religious bigotry, republican and royalist Terror and had its own Commune and Bastille-storming. It was the presence of so many Marseillaise Revolutionaries marching from the Rhine to Paris in 1792 which gave the Hymn of the Army of the Rhine its name of La Marseillaise , later to become the national anthem.

It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . Few cities leave the visitor with such vivid impressions, whether it's the drifting cherry blossoms in the tranquil gardens of Notre-Dame, the riverside quais on a summer evening, the sound of blues in atmospheric cellar bars, or the ancient alleyways and cobbled lanes of the historic Latin Quarter and villagey Montmartre.

According to its motto, SOFIA "grows but does not age" ( raste no ne staree ): a tribute to the mushrooming suburbs occupied by one-tenth of Bulgaria's population, and a cryptic reference to its ancient origins. Although various Byzantine ruins and a couple of mosques attest to a long and colourful history, little else in the city is of any real vintage. Sofia's finest architecture post-dates Bulgaria's liberation, when the capital of the infant state was laid out on a grid pattern in imitation of Western capitals - although the peeling stucco of its turn-of-the-century buildings lends an air of Balkan dilapidation to the capital's wide, tree-shaded boulevards.

Despite its reputation as one of Spain's greatest cities, TOLEDO can, in some ways, be a bit of a disappointment. Certainly, it's a city redolent of past glories, and is packed with sights - hence the whole city's status as a National Monument and UNESCO Patrimony of Mankind - but the extraordinary number of day-trippers has taken the edge off what was once the most extravagant of Spanish experiences. Still, the setting is breathtaking, and if you're an El Greco fan, you'd be mad to miss this city.

"Do you know Turin?" asked Nietzsche. "It is a city after my own heart & a princely residence of the seventeenth century, which has only one taste giving commands to everything, the court and its nobility. Aristocratic calm is preserved in everything; there are no nasty suburbs." Although Turin 's traffic-choked streets are no longer calm, and its suburbs are as dreary as any in Italy, the city centre's gracious Baroque thoroughfares, opulent palaces, sumptuous churches and splendid collections of Egyptian antiquities and northern European paintings are still there - a pleasant surprise to those who might have been expecting satanic factories and little else.