Paris

Paris is a capital that decided, centuries ago, that beauty was a civic duty rather than a decorative afterthought. Its boulevards, parks and façades were planned with an insistence that still shapes how the city feels today: legible, symmetrical, faintly theatrical. Walk almost anywhere in the centre and you are inside a piece of urban design that was meant to be looked at, not simply used.

The river splits the city into two moods rather than two halves. The Left Bank carries the old reputation for ideas and argument — cafés, bookshops, the university quarter. The Right Bank is grander and more commercial, home to the great museums and the wide avenues built for parade and spectacle. Neither claim is entirely fair to the other, but the distinction still holds enough truth to be useful.

Paris's museums are not simply large; they are foundational, the kind of collections that quietly set the terms for what a museum is supposed to do. The Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay between them cover most of Western art's greatest hits, but the city's real subject is itself — its own history of being watched, painted and argued over.

What keeps Paris from becoming a museum piece is its stubborn ordinariness underneath the grandeur: the markets, the arguments at the boulangerie counter, the neighbourhoods that have nothing to do with tourism at all. The postcard version is real, but it is only ever the surface.