Prague

Prague survived the twentieth century with its skyline more or less intact, which is why it looks the way it does: a working museum of Gothic, Baroque and Art Nouveau facades stacked along the Vltava without the gaps that bombing left in other European capitals. It was spared the worst of it, and the result is a centre where medieval street plans still dictate how you walk, and where nearly every view has something old and ornate in it.

The city grew as a seat of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman Emperors, and that royal ambition still shows in Prague Castle's sprawl above the river and in the density of churches, palaces and guild halls packed into the Old Town. Charles IV, in the fourteenth century, rebuilt much of it in stone and set the template for a capital that thought of itself as central to Europe, not peripheral.

Four decades of Communist rule after 1948 left their own mark, mostly in the grey housing estates ringing the historic core, and in a population that still tends towards dry humour about authority. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 reopened the city to the world, and it has spent the decades since being rediscovered, sometimes to its own irritation, by very large numbers of visitors.

What remains is a city of two speeds: a compact, monument-dense centre that can feel overrun at midday, and quieter residential districts a short tram ride out where ordinary Prague — pubs, parks, apartment blocks — carries on regardless. Both versions are worth your time.