Bucharest

The old north-south avenue is where the nineteenth-century city concentrated its ambitions, and walking its length is the best single introduction to Bucharest. Along it stand the Romanian Athenaeum, a domed circular concert hall from the 1880s built by public subscription and holding a circular fresco of the country's history around its auditorium, with an interior worth seeing on a tour even if you are not attending a concert; the former royal palace, now the National Museum of Art, whose Romanian medieval and modern collections are the best in the country; and a run of grand hotels, ministries and merchant palaces in varying states of restoration. Around the avenue the streets hold the city's most characteristic sight, which is not a monument at all: belle époque and interwar villas, some immaculately restored as embassies or offices, others visibly failing, with ironwork balconies, plaster mouldings and overgrown gardens. The contrast between the two conditions on a single street is the visual signature of Bucharest. Cișmigiu Gardens, the oldest public park in the city, sits just off the avenue and is where to sit down when the walking has done its work.

The Palace of Parliament is the thing everyone photographs, and it is genuinely difficult to take in: a single administrative building of a scale that does not register properly until you try to walk around it, at the head of a deliberately monumental avenue. The scale had a price the building still carries — an entire historic neighbourhood of churches, monasteries and thousands of homes was demolished to clear its ground, and it ended up so large that only a fraction of its rooms have ever been assigned a permanent government function. Guided tours run through a fraction of it and must be booked; bring identification, since it is a working legislative building. What is actually inside, and why so much of it has never been used, is set out in this country's own hub guide rather than repeated here. North-east of it, Lipscani is the surviving old commercial quarter and the closest the city comes to a historic centre: a compact grid of lanes that was derelict within living memory and is now dense with bars, terraces and restaurants, extremely lively at night and frankly touristy by day. Two things in it are worth seeking out regardless. Stavropoleos is a small early-eighteenth-century monastery church of exquisite carved stone and a quiet courtyard, entirely at odds with the street outside it. And a bookshop occupying a restored nineteenth-century building nearby, white-galleried over several floors around a central void, has become one of the most photographed interiors in the country for good reason.

Bucharest is greener than its reputation and the north of the city is where that shows. A large park wraps around a lake a few kilometres up from the centre, with a promenade, boat hire and the city's Sunday afternoon crowds, and on its western shore stands the Village Museum — an open-air collection of houses, churches, mills and workshops brought from every region of Romania and rebuilt on the site. It is one of the oldest museums of its kind in Europe and, for anyone whose trip includes the countryside, it is the best possible primer: you can walk from a Maramureș wooden gate to a Dobrogean reed-roofed house in ten minutes and see the whole country's building traditions in one afternoon. Nearby, the natural history museum is unusually good and the geology and botanical collections around it fill a rainy day. Further out, a very large thermal bathing complex on the northern edge of the city — greenhouses of palms, pools and slides fed by deep geothermal water — is where the city goes in winter and is a genuinely pleasant last afternoon before a flight, since it sits close to the airport. Between all of these, the residential north is the leafiest part of Bucharest and pleasant simply to walk.

Bucharest has by a distance the best eating in Romania — traditional inns doing the sour soups and grilled meats properly, a serious modern restaurant scene, good coffee, and terrace culture that fills every warm evening. What to order and why is set out in the food guide; what matters here is that the city is where the country's cooking is at its most ambitious and its most varied. It is also the most expensive place in the country, which in Romania still means inexpensive — the money guide sets out where the gap actually falls. On where to stay, the centre around the old town is convenient and noisy, the streets around the university and the avenue are quieter and better for walking, and the northern districts are green and residential but further from things. Getting around is straightforward: the metro is fast, cheap and covers the useful axes, and ride-hailing is inexpensive and removes the taxi question entirely. On how the city fits a trip, two nights is right — enough for the avenue, the palace, the village museum and an evening or two — and the trip-planning guide is firm that Bucharest is the start and end of a Romanian loop rather than a base to radiate from, because nothing in Transylvania is a realistic day trip from here. The one genuine day trip is north up the valley into Prahova, where a royal palace and a mountain cable car are two hours away by train.