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.

How many more heavy gold medals can Paris drape around its neck?

Acolytes claim the City of Light is the fashion and cultural capital of Europe, the West's greatest restaurant and food megapolis, a paradise for flaneurs, the mecca of hedonists and shop-till-you-drop materialists, the world's favorite city, period. Now, while the Swiss and Belgians weren't looking, Paris stole their milk cows and became the swaggering global capital of chic chocolate too.

Pundits quip that French president Nicolas Sarkozy set the stage. Elected in 2007, Sarkozy does not drink alcohol. He gobbles chocolat, the very best. His 24/7 excitability – some call it dynamism – are attributed in part to the capital's current choco-manie.

But everyone knows Theobroma cacao – especially the unadulterated dark variety containing at least 60 percent cocoa – is good for the health, the libido, the mind, the morale. It makes people happy, fills them with energy, lifts them out of depression, and cures everything from rabies and rashes to the common cold, without weight gain. Or so some boosters claim, with impressive if unproven scientific "evidence."

What better fuel for France's hyperactive, tea-tottling head of state, a man bent on seducing his rock star wife Carla Bruni and the famously difficult French masses?

The blogosphere, social media and even some normally sober dead-tree publications roar 24/7 about Paris's contemporary food scene. Hyperbole artists daily declare this the globe's greatest restaurant city, rebooted after lengthy decline. Upstarts in New York and London are fini, and eternal Rome is ancient history.

French cuisine is back, again?

Well, maybe.

One thing's certain: Paris is a favorite of food lovers and peripatetic hedonists. They wing and waddle here for the cosmopolitan dining scene and the peerless patisseries, world-class bakeries, chocolate-makers, specialty food emporiums, wine and cheese and butcher shops, and scores of open markets. Goods and services range from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the overall effect, the sense of epicurean opulence, is mesmerizing.

Paris also happens to host one of the world's great hayseed jamborees, the annual agricultural fair. Earthy, nose-twitching and kitsch, the Salon d'Agriculture transforms the Porte de Versailles into a farmyard feeding frenzy for nine days in late February. The 1,000 exhibitors draw an average 650,000 gawkers. Showcased are the combines, farming techniques, Far Side bovines, and rustic eats that make France the world's number-two agricultural power. Thirty-five countries participated this year. But as always, France was the star. Its roosters crowed louder. And when it came to prize-winning cattle, there was plenty of French bull.

Each year on the third Thursday of November, the world awakens with two words on its parched lips: Beaujolais Nouveau. The next morning it massages its temples and sighs.

In between, 40 million bottles of zingy Beaujolais Nouveau-the quaffable new-wine-are uncorked and spill their purple contents from Anchorage to Zhengzhou. Parties bubble into life, the biggest of them held on the eve of the official launch in the unlikely, homely little French town of Beaujeu, near Lyon. Long the seat of the aristocratic Sires de Beaujeu, it's the mothership that squeezes and sends forth this annual vinous tsunami.

Under a tent the size of a sports stadium, penguin-suited waiters hefting giant wooden buckets pour gallons of Beaujolais Nouveau into the raucous gullets of some 1,500 merrymakers. The grapey, intoxicating scent of carbonic maceration from freshly fermented gamay grape juice fills the air. Performers in silly costumes belly dance or belt out folk songs to the sound of accordions, fiddles, drums and saxophones. As the fête reaches dionysian paroxysms, fledgling members of the Compagnons du Beaujolais-in even sillier suits-are sworn into the bacchic brotherhood of Beaujolais winemakers.

Outside, fireworks and torches, the latter fashioned from grapevine stumps, light up the façades of the town's low stone houses and its hulking medieval church. There's dancing in the narrow main street, and gluttony, guzzling and genteel debauchery behind half-closed doors. The extravaganza-in its 22nd year running-is called the "Sarmentelles de Beaujolais" and it lasts five days, this year from Wednesday, November 17 through Sunday, November 21.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In 1493 he sailed the deep blue sea. Half a millennium later Genoa's ship has come in -- again.

Columbus was a native of Genoa, or so it's claimed. Though he sailed for Spain, he hailed from the capital of the Italian Riviera. The boomerang-shaped region's official name is Liguria. Stretching from Tuscany to Provence, Liguria includes the well-known resort destinations Portofino, the Cinque Terre, and San Remo. Somehow Genoa is not on most Riviera Grand Tours any more. And maybe that's for the best. It's Italy's great insider city, a real place that's been spared mass tourism.

After decades of decline in the late 20th century this atmospheric Mediterranean port has rebounded from rust-belt wreck. Backed by steep, craggy mountains and moated by the Gulf of Genoa, it's one of Italy's most picturesque, appealing and vibrant places to live and visit. But it isn't for everyone: visitors find none of the Italy-for-beginners qualities of Florence, for instance. Genoa still belongs to the Genoese.

As a concept, "spring forward, fall back" fits Paris to a tee.

The global collective consciousness may well hold the City of Light to be paradise in springtime -- spring rites and spring rain, the spring in the step of forward-looking dreamers who dream of April in Paris, and pipe that old tune. But what about the fall, alias autumn? If you ask me, the unsung season is an equally fine time of year to make Paris your own -- often without the crowds or peak rates.

Forget the foursome of three-syllable months with ponderous names: "September," "October," "November" and "December." Subtract the prosaic "fall" from the notation. Then try singing "Au-tumn in Paaa-ris." It's every bit as catchy as "A-pril." As with April, the "thrill" of autumn sometimes rhymes with "chill," though nowadays climate change can provide T-shirt weather right up to mid-November.

Weather -- la météo -- is the merest part of Paris' fall-back season. For the French, fall stands for the end of enforced rural isolation with in-laws and enfants terribles, the end of sunburns and heat stroke -- climate change again -- and a return to the stimulating animation of this self-consciously enlightened metropolis, la Ville Lumière.

Fall isn't l'automne in Paris anyway, it's la rentrée -- the re-entry. There's the "political re-entry," the "scholastic re-entry," the "cultural re-entry," and others still -- re-entries for food, wine, fashion and industrial action. Falling back into place in autumnal Paris is as natural as gravity, the metaphorical space-capsule of life drifting leaf-like back to Earth, or plummeting like a chestnut, the correlative objective of la rentrée.

A seagull and hawk dueled in the clear, blue sky directly in front of our noses. Waves crashed but we could not hear them, because they were far too far below.

Was this the land of dreamy dreams? No. Try the Cinque Terre.

The grapegrowers and woodsmen of the old, impoverished Cinque Terre used to be the exclusive owners of the view from on high, from what's now known as ridge trail #1. That view features not only seagulls and hawks but also stunted pine trees, scalloped scrabble cliffs, and tiered terraces planted with low grapevines and gnarled olive trees. All seem to be tumbling into the Mediterranean.


Nowadays the famous fivesome of Riviera villages are part of the Parco Nazionale delle Cinque Terre, an Italian National Park. Their inhabitants are anything but impoverished. There are no woodsmen. The grapegrowers and winemakers drive late-model cars that I could not afford. They ride high-tech monorails up and down the terraces to harvest their grapes, which are turned into an easy-to-quaff, over-priced wine. The seaside villagers are even more prosperous than their mountain brethern, made rich by tourism.

The price locals pay for prosperity is heavy: the area has been thoroughly denatured, luckily without destroying its physical beauty. The Cinque Terre are simply stupendously gorgeous. But this brave new eat-and-run world comes complete with body-to-body outsiders on beaches, and iffy trattorias with menus in English, German and Chinese. Tourism has revolutionized what was the Riviera's most sublimely isolated stretch.

The classic example is the village-to-village trail #2, now a hiker's highway year round. A toll is charged by affable park officials, whose writ is to collect enough money to repair the trails the tourists wreck. Backpack-to-backpack with garrulous enthusiasts, many on package tours, hikers account for the bulk of the 2 million-plus visitors to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Cinque Terre are being loved to death, like Yosemite.

The good news is, the long, lonely path atop the crest behind the feeding frenzy-a place of seagulls, hawks and mavericks-gives you a taste of the Cinque Terre of yesteryear, meaning 30 or 40 years ago. Even better, convenient improvements unheard of 40 years ago have been added in the last decade. Trattorias, cafés, hotels and public transportation are lavished on those intrepid enough to head for the hills. The park's plan is to lure hikers off the seaside route to save it from ruin, and also provide an economic stimulus to those operating hospitality centers above.

A few minutes before noon Saint Peter's begins caroling its bells. This tintinnabulation began at the beginning of time and presumably will continue until the end of it. The Vatican's bells are followed by 900 other lunch bells ringing from 900 lesser churches scattered among the city's Seven Hills. As the ringing reaches noontide paroxysms, a cannon springs out of a bunker atop Rome's highest hill and blasts a single deafening shot. It silences the bells for a second, perhaps two.


The cannon is kept on the Janiculum Hill underneath panoramic Piazzale Garibaldi. In the center of this square, an imposing equestrian monument to General Giuseppe Garibaldi reminds Italians of the glories and sacrifices of nationhood. Hero of the Roman Republic and Risorgimento, Garibaldi is the country's George Washington. From the 1840s to 1870s he fought bloody battles on the Janiculum-and elsewhere-to unite Italy, drive out foreign occupiers and cast off the proverbial papal yoke.

Mounted atop his charger, Garibaldi's bronze effigy seems to smile at the stroke of midday. He is not smirking at stunned tourists. Famously anticlerical, Garibaldi's cannon blast is a daily raspberry aimed at the dome of Saint Peter's a quarter-mile north. Or at least so it seems to me. The juxtaposition symbolizes the tragicomic struggle of Italian society to reconcile anarchic, secular, hedonistic republicanism with the timeless-some might say anachronistic-strictures of Roman Catholicism.

The view from Piazzale Garibaldi stretches from Saint Peter's across Rome's monument-studded center to the Alban Hills and Appenines. Wander up the looping, landscaped staircases from the Vatican, or the low-lying Trastevere quarter along the Tiber. Or do as the natives do and roar up under the towering sycamores to take the air. The Janiculum is cooler and windier than the rest of Rome. Once here, belly up to the balustrade of Garibaldi's panoramic terrace. Itinerant rose-hawkers, most of them illegal immigrants, will thrust long-stemmed roses into your hands.