Spain's southern city of Seville basks in romantic myths and legends, evoking the scent of jasmine and orange blossom. But there is an ascetic core to its sybaritic spirit. For all their fame as passionate performers, the poet Unamuno called Sevillanos "finos y frios"-refined and cool. Once Europe's most cosmopolitan metropolis, bridging cultures of East and West and hub of a sea-borne empire, Seville was defined by Spain's great seventeenth-century playwright Lope de Vega as "port and gateway to the Indies." The city retains both the swagger of its seafaring heyday, and the sensual flavor of...

Hong Kong is the epitome of the modern city and a crossroads between eastern and western cultures. Today the city is most famously characterized by its breathtaking skyscraper skyline, dominating its "fragrant" harbor. The hundred-year-old Star Ferry, which continues to ply the seven-minute route between Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, enhances the nocturnal magic of this unique maritime city, composed of China's southernmost peninsula and an archipelago of over two hundred islands.

Hong Kong has always been something of an anomaly, and an outpost of empire, whether British or...

The views of Budapest by the River Danube are unparalleled in Europe. On one side the Buda Hills reach almost to the riverside, with Castle Hill and Gellert Hill offering outstanding panoramas. Pest, linked to Buda by a series of imposing bridges, with its mixture of late nineteenth-century Historicist and early twentieth-century Art Nouveau architecture, is still very much a "turn-of-the-century" city.

For more than fifty years prior to the Second World War, Budapest was one of the outstanding cultural capitals of Central Europe, on a par with, and in some ways ahead of, Vienna and...