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.
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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.
Since the beginning of tourism, PISA has been known for just one thing - the Leaning Tower , which serves around the world as a shorthand image for Italy. It is indeed a freakishly beautiful building, a sight whose impact no amount of prior knowledge can blunt. Yet it is just a single component of Pisa's breathtaking Campo dei Miracoli , or Field of Miracles, where the Duomo, Baptistry and Camposanto complete a dazzling architectural ensemble. These, and a dozen or so churches and palazzi scattered about the historic ...
Whatever your real interest is in Campania, the chances are that you'll wind up in NAPLES - capital of the region and, indeed, of the whole Italian south. It's the kind of city laden with visitors' preconceptions, and it rarely disappoints: it is filthy, it is very large and overbearing, it is crime-infested, and it is most definitely like nowhere else in Italy - something the inhabitants will be keener than anyone to tell you. In all these things lies the city's charm. Perhaps the feeling that you're somewhere unique makes it possible to endure the noise and harassment, perhaps it's the feeling that in less than three hours you've travelled from an ordinary part of Europe to somewhere akin to an Arab bazaar. One thing, though, is certain: a couple of days here and you're likely to be as staunch a defender of the place as its most devoted inhabitants. Few cities on earth inspire such fierce loyalties.
The dynamo behind the country's "economic miracle", MILAN is a city like no other in Italy. It's foggy in winter, muggy in summer, and is closer in outlook, as well as distance, to London than to Palermo. This is no city of peeling palazzi, cobbled piazzas and la dolce vita , but one in which time is money, the pace fast, and where consumerism and the work-ethic rule the lives of its power-dressed citizens.
BUCHAREST (Bucuresti), with a population of over two million, may be the largest city between Berlin and Athens, but it's by no means the most beautiful. At first sight the city is a chaotic jumble of traffic-choked streets, ugly concrete apartment blocks and grandiose but unfinished Communist developments. Lying 64km from the Danube, Romania's southern border, but 600km from its northern frontier, it's also far removed from the country's more obvious attractions. And yet, it's Romania's centre of government and commerce and site of its main airport, so most visitors to the country will find themselves passing through Bucharest at some point.
