Istanbul

Istanbul is not a city you visit so much as one you fall into. Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul are stacked on the same seven hills, and you feel all three at once — a Roman cistern beneath your feet, an Ottoman dome overhead, a ferry horn carrying across the Bosphorus. The call to prayer rises five times a day over a skyline of minarets, and the strait below stitches Europe to Asia in a single shimmering seam.

Spend your mornings in Sultanahmet, where the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque face each other across a garden of fountains and tulips, then lose an afternoon in the Grand Bazaar — sixty covered streets, four thousand shops, the smell of leather, saffron and çay. By evening the city turns to the water: a sunset cruise past Ottoman palaces, a fish sandwich at Eminönü, a rooftop overlooking the Golden Horn as the lights come on.

What lingers, though, is the texture of ordinary life. The tea houses of Çukurcuma, the antique dealers of Galata, the bakeries selling simit by the dozen, the cats who own the city. Istanbul rewards the unhurried — give it three days and it will give you a thousand years.