Dublin, Irland

Dublin is one of Europe's most human-scale capitals: small enough to walk across in an hour, dense enough to sustain days of exploration. The city divides naturally between the Northside (O'Connell Street, the GPO where the 1916 Rising began, the Writers' Museum, the Hugh Lane Gallery) and the Southside (Trinity College, Temple Bar, St Stephen's Green, the Grafton Street shopping district, and the Georgian squares of Merrion and Fitzwilliam). Trinity College's Long Room library — a cathedral of dark oak and leathered books, housing the 9th-century Book of Kells — is the single most visited interior in the country, and for good reason. The pubs of Dublin are not a tourist cliché but a genuine civic institution: Mulligan's on Poolbeg Street, The Long Hall on South Great George's Street, Neary's on Chatham Street, and the literary pub trail centred around McDaid's (Brendan Behan drank here), Davy Byrnes (mentioned in Ulysses), and the Palace Bar. The Guinness Storehouse at St James's Gate — a converted fermentation vessel with a panoramic rooftop bar — is overrun but genuinely interesting for the brewing history. More rewarding for serious visitors: the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle (world-class collection of Islamic, East Asian, and Western manuscripts, free entry), the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street (Iron Age bog bodies, the Tara Brooch, free entry), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Day trips to Newgrange (Neolithic passage tomb, 3200 BCE, older than the pyramids) and Glendalough (monastic ruins in a glacial valley in Wicklow) are excellent from Dublin.