Paris

Paris treats art as public infrastructure. The consequence is queues, and the antidote is knowing which hour to arrive.

France nationalised its masterpieces in 1793 and has never quite got over the achievement. The result is a city where the state owns the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, a train station full of Impressionists and a former royal greenhouse containing the Water Lilies, and where all of it is priced for citizens rather than tourists: a single Louvre ticket costs less than a decent lunch two streets away.

The price is congestion. The Louvre takes nine million visitors a year through doors designed for a palace, and the Mona Lisa room has become a photography scrum that has nothing to do with looking at a painting. The city rewards the visitor who goes sideways: the Orangerie holds two oval rooms of Monet that most itineraries skip, the Musée Carnavalet is free and tells the story of the city itself, and the Petit Palais gives away a collection that would be a national museum anywhere else.

In the evening Paris is an opera town first and a jazz town second, with a theatre scene that remains stubbornly French and rewards anyone who can follow it. The Palais Garnier is worth a ticket even for a programme you do not care about: you are buying the staircase as much as the stage.