David Downie

Rome stands for romance, history, art, architecture and fab food. Florence is for culture; Venice is for moody beauty and atmosphere.

What about Milan?

Milan is where the technocrat Prime Minister Mario Monti comes from, the little gray man whose job is to save Italy from bankruptcy. Bankruptcy seems unlikely: in the midst of this unending "recession," Italy prospers and Milan is booming.

Muscular Milan is Italy's biggest city, the source of a third of this fabulously rich nation's income, the location of most of Italy's high tech and heavy industries, the capital of the country's fashion, business, finance and banking.

Milan is also an experiment in globalization, Italian style. It is pioneering a new brand of tourism-friendly Dolce Vita. This may be bittersweet but it looks like a way forward for aging, debt-plagued Italy.

Kaleidoscopic armies of immigrants are pouring in, opening shops and providing services, cooking, cleaning, doctoring and melding with the locals. Colorful disorder – homelessness and shantytowns included – is repainting a dour town that used to be nicknamed "the moral capital of Switzerland."

Compared to the joyless workaholic city I lived in nearly 30 years ago, Milan is unrecognizable –except for the perennial streetcars, outsized cathedral and other hulking old buildings. It's not only multi-ethnic, but also animistic and chaotically alive. Much of the city center is closed to traffic now and has been re-landscaped and groomed. Café terraces spill where trucks and buses once thundered along. The prospect of frivolous enjoyment of the kind reserved for Romans now energizes the streets – especially those nearest to the center of the spider web cityscape.

Just north of Portofino on the Italian Riveria, on the Genoa side of the Monte di Portofino Regional Park, is a perched hamlet called San Rocco di Camogli. This is the best place on earth to devour the marvelously flavorful minnows that come from the Gulf of Genoa, which the locals call rossetti - little red things. And little red things they are: about an inch long, thin as a thermometer, translucent, and with a little red dot near the gills. You don't just pop rossetti in your mouth whole - you fork in dozens of them at a time. And the best place to do this is on San Rocco di Camogli's single street, at the venerable restaurant La Cucina di Nonna Nina - Grandma Nina's Kitchen.

You will not find Grandma Nina in the establishment: she left her corporeal essence behind some years ago, and never set foot in the place anyway. She also left behind many delicious regional recipes from yesteryear, recipes transformed into exquisitely delectable dishes by the elusive, retiring, shy Paolo Delpian and his wife, Rosalia, Grandma Nina's natural heirs.

Paolo says little and works a lot: he's not a super chef and doesn't like "super" anything, including wine. He's an excellent cook who makes everything from scratch, fresh, using local ingredients. Rosalia runs the show. A bona fide grandmother, she doesn't look the part. She's fashionably turned out and has little of the plump, flour-dusted Italian nonna of yesteryear. The restaurant and its food reflect the owners' personalities: quiet, discreet, tastefully simple.

Tasteful simplicity is the root of the best Italian cooking. Paolo gets his minnows squirming fresh - they're too small to flip. They're fished along the jagged coast below the restaurant - whose dining room is blissfully unequipped with a distracting panoramic view. Into boiling water go the minnows, and mere seconds later, they're slid onto a warm plate, then onto your table and into your watering mouth. Purists eat them this way, naked. Others dribble their minnows with the lightest, fruitiest local Ligurian olive oil: full-bodied oil would spoil the delicate flavor. A minnow-sized pinch of salt is also allowed. And then: piscine heaven.

French star architect Jean Nouvel once gave me a ride home from his studio in Paris' edgy 11th arrondissement. I chuckled to discover that the guru of transparency, glass and steel lives around the corner from me in a 1600s building on the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, the spinal column of the Marais. Old is better?

I was amused but not surprised: after 40 years of blanket gentrification the Marais has reportedly become theplace to live for a mix of fashion designers, artists, architects, auctioneers and other professionals–plus droves of bobos, meaning bohemian bourgeois. It's so desirable that it's practically unlivable.

Luckily you don't have to move here to enjoy the Marais: wandering its patchwork of streets from the 1500s-1800s is still a magical experience.

For one thing, super-rich celebs and bobos aren't the only ones drawn here. Trawl the gay district around Rue Vieille du Temple, the Rue des Rosiers Jewish neighborhood, or the Place des Vosges-the Marais' centerpiece square-and you'll discover a global festival of hip hedonism.

What's the attraction? The Marais' storied streets spread on the Right Bank between Beaubourg (the Pompidou Center) and the Bastille, the Seine, and the dowdy Place de la République. They're home to enough boutiques, museums, art galleries, trendy restaurants and cafés stuffed into landmark townhouses to defeat even those born to shop (the French call such people "window-lickers"). This is a safari park for people-watchers, a study in how to preserve and gentrify a unique historic neighborhood.

The penurious few who wound up here before the Marais became trendy do what we can to appreciate the hallowed atmosphere without sounding like party-poopers. Truth be told each time I step out I discover something new and wonderful in my backyard. But I always find myself at least once a day in the Place des Vosges.

It's not that Paris doesn't have Nativity Scenes or Christmas trees or even Santa Claus-lookalikes called le Père Noel-Father Christmas..

It's not that Parisians don't string blinking lights, buy extravagant gifts, throw parties, ring bells, and sing "noel-noel". Isn't noel French for "Christmas?" A few French faithful even attend ceremonies, light candles, observe Advent Lent, and fold hands in drafty sanctuaries that echo in emptiness the rest of the year.

But somehow in this militantly secular republic, where freedom from religion is a religion in itself, Christmas really isn't about Christmas. Not the way "les Anglo-Saxons" seem to celebrate it.

Noel in Paris is a time for worshipping the true French cult: food and wine, la grande bouffe. It's pagan, it's druidical, it's not just pre-Revolutionary, it's possibly pre-Roman or prehistoric and thoroughly ancient Gallic, meaning totally contemporary French.

Christmas in Paris is a fattening tale of extreme Thanksgiving-like gourmandizing, gluttonizing, gobbling, gnoshing and every other imaginable variation on the theme of snarfing up and scarfing down fine edibles and nectarous potables.

Holiday food markets and an extra rasher of farmer's and neighborhood markets mushroom in squares across the land and sometimes even fill bridges that cross the Seine. The Champs-Elysées, Trocadéro, Notre-Dame, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Place de la Nation and other history-soaked sites swarm with humanity drawn like flies to rustic stands groaning with goodies from the provinces.

People who tell you they've seen and done Paris frankly don't know what they're talking about.
Sure, Paris is timeless in its way: often you feel you've stepped back centuries. Cafés from the Belle Epoque, monuments from the Middle Ages and recipes from the butter-and-cream days before the Great War-all transport you to a place where time and taste stand still, a "been there, done that" universe.

But here's one paradox of many: few cities have as varied and changing an arts and culture scene as Paris. How many towns can lay claim to hundreds of galleries and foundations, and 150 museums? Alongside their permanent collections, each mounts temporary exhibitions. Some art or history shows run for nearly a year at a time and appear-another paradox-to be permanent fixtures. When they're over you can barely believe it, especially if you didn't find time to see them.

I've lived in Paris for over 25 years and still haven't seen all its galleries, foundations and museums. Every few months they shed their skin of temporary shows. Actually the metaphor isn't accurate: the constant changing of the artistic guard is more a staggered and staggering relay race run over an eerily familiar course.

Try asking those Paris-weary friends of yours whether they've seen the latest Modernist show-meaning the magnificent collection of Gertrude, Leo and Michael Stein: "Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso... The Adventure of the Steins" at the Grand Palais?

What about the bowl-you-over Cézanne retrospective at the Luxembourg?

The good news is Paris' kaleidoscopic, multiple-choice future is playing today not in a theater near you but in the Oberkampf, Ménilmontant and Belleville neighborhoods. That's where Algiers meets Caracas and Istanbul via Zanzibar. Despite occasional intrusions by fanatics, the inhabitants here and in Paris' many other ethnic enclaves seem to get along like traditional French peas in the pod.

Never heard of Oberkampf, Ménilmontant or Belleville? That's not surprising. Outlying, in the north-by-northeastern sector of town, they're not chic. They have no claims to fame other than as the home to Père-Lachaise Cemetery and the birthplace of Edith Piaf, the raucous crooner of "La Vie en Rose" and yesteryear's hits.

For 20 years I rented an office in the Ménilmontant district. My desk now overlooks the Place de la Bastille and Marais. But I'm still a regular to my old haunts: the cemetery is Paris' most atmospheric hideaway, if you ask me. And there's no better place to get a haircut, eat as if you were on the Bosporus, or pick up spiky, smelly, scary specialty foods.

Why the haircut? My barber for years was affable Monsieur David-pronounced Dah-veed-a Moroccan who wore a Star of David and a beret and ate baguette sandwiches filled with many things, from many animals, including the kind that provide ham and bacon.

Nowadays it's Mustafa or Ali who snip at the graying tufts still clinging to my scalp. Like Monsieur Daveed, when Mustafa and Ali work my head over they cut back and forth between French and other languages, their jaws moving like well-oiled scissors.

All three barbers favor Radio Nostalgie and Radio Montmartre, with tunes from Piaf's heyday. Like them she was supremely French: a foundling whose parents and grandparents were immigrants-in Piaf's case they came from the French provinces, Italy and North Africa.

Portofino's horseshoe-shaped harbor and plumb-line cliffs are among the more actively gorgeous places on the Italian Riviera, as Italians call the boomerang-shaped region of northern Liguria. And Liguria is one of my favorite regions in the world for hiking, eating, dreaming and wandering.

A picture-postcard faux fishing port, Portofino is the Riviera's most glamorous time warp: the villas of the super-rich perch on pine-studded promontories jutting into the Mediterranean. Billionaires like Silvio Berlusconi spend precious leisure hours here. "Precious" is the operative word.

Five hundred years ago one irreverent overnight traveler noted that in Portofino "you were charged not only for the room but the very air you breathed."

Paying for the atmosphere is still what Portofino is all about.

But my wife Alison and I have a novel way enjoying Portofino for free. It includes some of the greatest views on the Mediterranean seaboard, plus lots of fresh air, and exercise. Naturally on either end of our "Portofino Perfect" walking experience (and even halfway along it) you can drop a few euros for a cappuccino, or spend $200 per head for a snack at a fashionable ristorante.

Outdoors in a panoramic park behind the famous cathedral of Chartres a teenage girl skipped along the concentric pathways of a grassy labyrinth. Other kids shouted and kicked a soccer ball. Young lovers simultaneously pecked at each other and the touchpads of their handheld devices, observed by curious onlookers.

Most such onlookers in Chartres are day-trippers from nearby Paris: The capital is an hour's ride east on a commuter train.

A hundred yards away from the sunny, lively grass labyrinth, silence reigned inside the looming stone cathedral of Chartres. The cool, echoing nave was lit by glowing stained-glass windows and held aloft by flying buttresses. An unusual procession was underway. Spiritual seekers shuffled, slid or crawled along the 850-foot-long, serpentine stone pathway marked out on the floor some 800 years ago. They were following the convolutions of the "real" labyrinth, the one that has made Chartres a pilgrimage site for labyrinth-walkers worldwide.

Chartres is the Queen of European cathedrals, with acres of stained glass. It's among the world's most astonishing ecclesiastical edifices in beauty and historical value. The cathedral also has one of the tallest naves and spires anywhere and the most original, wheel-like buttresses too. Atop a gentle rise overlooking the Eure River, the site where central Chartres spreads is magical: Ancient Druids, the priests of the Gauls, met where the cathedral now stands. Or so claimed Julius Caesar.

Say "Rome" and like Pavlov's dog, millions worldwide will bark "Colosseum," "Forum" or "Vatican."

Ask even an intrepid traveler with an insider's track on the Eternal City and you still probably won't get "Garbatella" in reply.

Yet these days Garbatella is among Rome's hippest, most charming and atmospheric neighborhoods, with one of my favorite authentic, throw-back trattorias anywhere.

First, no tourists: Garbatella is south of the historic sites wrapped by Rome's Seven Hills, south of the Pyramid of Cestius, south even of the Ostiense train station and the daily commuter scrum.

But it's easy to get to: Look for the towering old "gasometro" gas storage facility. Then keep going south another half mile toward the unsung Catacombs of Commodilla. Or take a direct metro to Garbatella and walk southeast five minutes. You've arrived when the streets climb and twist and turn, when sidewalk gardens and trees appear between strange, seemingly postmodern palazzi.

Fred Flintstone might recognize the giant ribsteak served at L'Auberge de Jack. This poster-hung, cozy country bistro in Milly Lamartine is one of my favorite locales in Burgundy. Draw up a wooden chair and eat and drink with the locals. It's unpretentious, affordable, and, à propos of locales, entirely local in its sourcing. It's fun, too: a joyful dining experience.

Fred Flintstone would feel right at home: scenic, stone-built Milly Lamartine perches on a hillside a few miles from a famous prehistoric site, the Roche de Solutré, known for its bones, stones and wines.

Owners Sylvie Bouschet and her chef-husband Jack are from Mâcon, 10 miles east of Milly Lamartine. They've never heard of the Flintstones or locavores, either. But eaters of local food worldwide might want to make L'Auberge de Jack the template for their movement: there's no mission statement accompanying the Charolais beef, raised by a family farmer near Charolles, 20 miles away, and served rare with thick-cut, housemade fries, some of the best you'll ever eat. Sylvie and Jack don't trade on common sense: for 30 years they've been buying wholesome, quality products from trustworthy people nearby.

But ask and you'll discover the plump pork sausages simmered in Beaujolais come from Monsieur Girard, the butcher in Pierreclos, another handsome village, down the road a piece. The Beaujolais comes from over the bluff, near Solutré, ten minutes south by corkscrew road. That's where the Burgundy and Beaujolais regions overlap. Excellent, underrated wines come from the eroded, limestone escarpments: Pouilly-Fuissé, Saint-Véran, Moulin à Vent and others.