Moscow, Russia: Red Square, the metro palaces and the great museums

The Kremlin is a walled precinct rather than a single building, and the ticket that matters admits you to Cathedral Square inside it — a tight group of white churches with gilded and silver domes, their interiors dark with frescoes and iconostases, plus the bell tower and an enormous cracked bell and cannon that were never used. Buy the Armoury separately and allow real time for it: the collection of regalia, carriages, ceremonial arms, thrones and jewelled goldsmith work is extraordinary, and it is timed-entry. Outside the walls, Red Square is simply enormous, and St Basil's at its southern end is worth entering — the interior is a warren of narrow, painted chapels rather than a single space, which almost nobody expects.

Moscow's underground is a genuine attraction and the cheapest one in the city. The stations of the older lines were built as public halls: chandeliers and coffered ceilings at Komsomolskaya, backlit stained glass at Novoslobodskaya, bronze figures under the arches at Ploshchad Revolyutsii, mosaic ceilings you have to stand still and look up at along the Circle line. The practical way to see them is to ride the brown Circle line and get off at whichever stations look interesting, then rejoin — one fare, an hour or so, and you will have seen more marble and mosaic than in most museums. Trains run very frequently and stations are announced in Russian, so counting stops or following the map on your phone is easier than listening.

The State Tretyakov Gallery is the one to prioritise if you choose only one: Russian art from medieval icons — including work attributed to Rublev — through to the nineteenth-century realist painting that shaped how the country pictured itself. Its separate modern branch on Krymsky Val holds the twentieth-century collection, including the avant-garde. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts covers the European canon and has a strong Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holding. Both reward a half-day rather than an hour. For something lighter, the Museum of Cosmonautics under the titanium rocket monument at VDNKh is genuinely well done and appeals to people who do not normally like museums.

Gorky Park was remade some years ago from a fairground into a well-designed riverside park — cycle paths, open-air seating, an embankment that is pleasant to walk in any season and used for skating in winter. Next to Red Square, Zaryadye is the newer one, a landscaped park of Russian habitats with a curved concrete bridge that projects out over the river with no supports beneath its tip, giving the best free view back at the Kremlin and the water. For the wide panorama, the observation platform on the Sparrow Hills looks across the whole city with the university's spire behind it, and river cruises run along the centre from spring through autumn.

Beyond the centre the city keeps a set of walled monastic ensembles that are among its most beautiful and least crowded places. Novodevichy is the finest: white and red brick walls, a cluster of towers, and a pond beside it that reflects the whole group — the view that Levitan and others painted. Kolomenskoye, further out on the river, is a former royal estate turned park, with a startling white tented-roof church that is one of the oldest and most original buildings in the region. Tsaritsyno, at the southern end of a metro line, is a large landscape park around a Gothic-revival palace ensemble. All three make good half-days when the centre becomes too much.

Russian cooking is better than its reputation and best sampled through the things that are actually good: pelmeni and vareniki dumplings, blini with sour cream and — if you are willing — with caviar or with the far cheaper red roe, pickles of every kind, herring under a coat of beetroot and mayonnaise, and soups that are meals, from borscht to solyanka. But the discovery for most visitors is that Georgian food is a Moscow staple, not a novelty: khachapuri, the cheese-filled bread that arrives molten, and khinkali, the soup dumplings you hold by the twisted top, are available everywhere and are excellent. Markets such as Danilovsky have been reworked into food halls, which is the easy way to try several things at once.

Two things shape a Moscow trip more than any sight. First, money: foreign-issued cards do not work here — not in shops, not in restaurants, not at ATMs, and not through a phone wallet linked to them. Bring your whole budget in euros or dollars in cash, exchange it in stages at official bureaux or banks rather than on the street, and keep small notes for taxis, markets and transport. Second, distance: this is a very large city, so plan by metro line rather than by map distance, and expect any walk between two landmarks to take longer than it looks. Season matters too — May to September is mild and long-lit, while deep winter is severe but genuinely handsome, with the city built to keep functioning through it.