Париж

Paris needs no introduction, which is precisely why it rewards one. Two thousand years of capital ambition lie stacked along the Seine — Roman Lutetia under the Latin Quarter, Gothic audacity at Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre's kilometre of art, Haussmann's grey-and-gold boulevards, the iron exclamation mark of 1889 — and through it all runs the city's real constant: the conviction that art is a public matter, to be argued over like politics.

Music has always been argued over here most fiercely of all. Lully invented French opera for the Sun King; Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt made Paris Romanticism's arena; Debussy and Ravel dissolved harmony in its salons. And on 29 May 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées — Auguste Perret's concrete masterpiece on the avenue Montaigne, with Bourdelle's reliefs above the door — Stravinsky's Rite of Spring provoked the most famous riot in musical history. That house still runs one of Europe's great concert seasons, joined across the city by the Opéra national de Paris in its two homes, the Philharmonie's silver hull at La Villette, and more stages than any one lifetime can attend. On the Left Bank, the headquarters of UNESCO at Place de Fontenoy adds its own hall to the city's musical map — concerts under an architecture furnished by Picasso, Miró and Calder, where music serves diplomacy's oldest purpose: reminding nations what they have in common. Paris, as ever, presides.