Haarlem

Haarlem taught Europe to gamble on flowers and let a child play its organ. The tulip trade concentrated here in the 1630s — the bulb fields still stripe the sand soils toward the sea, and the mania's contracts changed hands in Haarlem's taverns — while in the Grote Kerk of St Bavo, filling one side of the handsome market square, stands the Müller organ of 1738: five thousand pipes of rococo splendour played by Handel, and in 1766 by a ten-year-old visitor named Mozart, a fact the town has dined on contentedly ever since. The organ still sounds in summer recitals, the national instrument in its most glamorous dress.

Haarlem's Golden Age painter stayed home: Frans Hals, whose laughing portraits hang in the museum bearing his name, in the old men's almshouse he himself ended in — and the town's hofjes, the almshouse courtyards behind modest doors, remain the city's secret garden network. The Teylers Museum, unchanged since 1784, is the oldest museum in the Netherlands, its fossils and instruments displayed in original oval-roomed candour. The concert record's register — churches, choirs, cultural centres, visiting ensembles — describes the town fairly, with St Bavo as the crowning stage. Tulips, Hals, and Mozart's small hands on the great keys: Haarlem peaked early and aged perfectly.