Lady with an Ermine
Source: Leonardo da Vinci
I’m not much of a traveler, so my recent trip to North Central Europe for a conference was my first visit to the mother continent since a single day in Istanbul in 2009.
I’d never been to that part of Europe before, so I stuck to the obvious destinations: Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and Warsaw. I’m a tourist, not a traveler, so I wanted to see the stereotypical sights.
Hence, don’t expect me to offer on-the-spot insights into the great issues of the time, such as immigration. I mostly stuck to the expensive old towns that arose within the medieval walls.
Cultured Americans are always complaining about how America doesn’t have walkable cities like Europe does. But the extreme density of European cities first emerged because townspeople needed to crowd within a few hundred or just a few dozen acres inside the stone parapets.
Early America did have some wooden palisades, such as along Wall Street on lower Manhattan Island. But in most colonial American cities, by the time the first generation’s wooden walls would have needed replacement by a massive investment in permanent stone fortifications, the American Indian menace typically had been pushed far westward. After that, Americans had little to worry about from European great powers or from other Americans.
“I’m a tourist, not a traveler, so I wanted to see the stereotypical sights.”
So, other than in a few cities such as Manhattan, San Francisco, and New Orleans that are extremely constrained by water, we allowed our cities to sprawl inordinately.
That doesn’t stop Europeans from visiting America. My twelve-hour flight home to Los Angeles from Warsaw was utterly jammed with Polish tourists, even though in my experience escorting visitors to Los Angeles around, unless we happen to luck into a celebrity sighting, they tend to go home, not unreasonably, bored.
My single wholly satisfied guest in L.A. had the good fortune one day in 1982 as we inched along Dead Man’s Curve on Sunset Boulevard to find that our traffic jam was due to TV actor Scott Baio having wrapped his brand-new supercar around a lamppost. Fortunately, Baio was unhurt. Dressed head to toe in Fiorucci sportswear, he was pacing unhappily on the curb talking to somebody (his agent, I presume) in an agitated manner on his shoebox-size pre-cellular mobile phone. My friend went home to Houston happy in the knowledge that Los Angeles was exactly how he’d always imagined it would be, with celebrities making public fools of themselves.
In contrast to L.A., the inner cores of the great cities of Europe are intensely concentrated to squeeze within their usually no-longer-existent walls. For example, most of imperial Vienna’s spectacular sights are in the one mile in diameter Innere Stadt within the Ringstrasse boulevard built on the site of the old walls in the 19th century.
Ideally, these old towns weren’t destroyed in recent wars. Famously, Prague largely survived World War II intact. It thus looks like a museum of every style of European architecture since the Romanesque, as if Czechia has been ruled for generations by the Disney dynasty going back to Good King Walt. This has helped make it the cultural capital of post–Berlin Wall NYU study-abroad students.
Tom Wolfe pointed out in his college novel I Am Charlotte Simmons that “…the existence of conspicuous consumption one has rightful access to—as a student had rightful access to the fabulous Dupont Memorial Library—creates a sense of well-being.”
I was smiling nonstop in Prague due to the sense of well-being.
The Czech Republic in 2025 seems like an ideal mix of Slavic humanity and Teutonic perfectionism. From the 19th century onward, the Czechs strove to match the ruling Austrians in building opera houses and the like to demonstrate that they deserved to rule themselves.
Note that despite its lack of historic catastrophes, Prague is still a sort of Ship of Theseus town. Most of the great buildings have been rebuilt every couple of hundred years.
Vienna was bombed moderately by U.S. and U.K. aircraft late in the war, with the 450-foot-tall Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the center of town being badly damaged in 1945. The citizens of Austria rebuilt the roof by 1952, although it could still use some new stained glass.
Vienna, as befits an imperial capital, has the most impressive single buildings of the five cities I visited, although Prague might be the most delightful overall.
Likewise, Krakow, the late medieval capital of Poland, wasn’t horrifically devastated during WWII. I’d barely heard of Krakow until I asked readers for suggestions for places to visit near Berlin and many responded that Krakow was their No. 1 choice.
It’s a sort of patriotic party town for Poles, kind of like if the Confederacy had conquered Washington, D.C., so the Union had relocated its capital to hard-drinking Madison, Wis., which attracted a constant influx of red-blooded American farmers looking to party.
I stayed on famous Grodzka Street, just around the corner from Krakow’s impressive main square. Initially, the roar from drunken Polish youth singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” a cappella seemed daunting, but it turned out that practically everything in 2025 Poland provided by the highly enterprising private sector is state-of-the-art technology, so my brand-new double-paned windows allowed me to sleep fine.
On the other hand, Poles don’t like working for the government—Stalin grumbled that imposing Communism on Poland was like fitting a saddle upon a cow—so most of the railway, mass transit, and national airline enterprises are below average.
Krakow isn’t quite as wonderful as Prague, but if you visit it first, you’ll be highly impressed. Note that in the middle of Krakow is the Princess Czartoryski Museum, which mostly features the kind of stuff that Polish aristocrats liked, such as swords, guns, ladies’ fans, and family portraits, plus two world-historic paintings: a rare Rembrandt landscape and Leonardo’s staggering portrait of a Lady With an Ermine.
While you might have to grapple with a few hundred people to get up close to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, in Krakow I only had to jostle with a dozen to see a Leonardo that seems manifestly superior.
Granted, Lady With an Ermine is in all likelihood not the greatest painting in the world.
But then again, it just might be.
Warsaw, in contrast to Prague and Krakow, was absolutely flattened in 1944 by the Nazis putting down the Warsaw Uprising by the Polish Home Army while the Red Army leisurely camped on the opposite bank of the Vistula River. It’s not all that clear why the Germans went through all the trouble of annihilating right-wing Polish nationalism before fleeing Warsaw rather than leaving the task to complicate the lives of their Soviet enemies, other than that’s what Nazis liked to do.
The Polish Communists did a decent job of rebuilding Warsaw’s Old Town over 1945–1955. If you have a chance to see Prague or Krakow first, Warsaw’s rebuilding won’t be perfectly satisfactory.
But still, it’s not bad.
In general, much of Central Europe’s artistic talent has been deployed for the past eighty years in rebuilding the great structures lost in 1939-1945.
Moreover, Stalin’s regime put up in the 1950s a couple of miles south of Old Town a sensational 778-foot wedding-cake skyscraper, one of the great high-rises of that otherwise architecturally boring decade.
It’s now the center of Warsaw’s high-rise district. While Warsaw lags far behind Moscow in supertall skyscrapers, with only one 300-meter (984-foot) building compared with six in Russia’s capital, Warsaw still has an impressive modern uptown erected in recent years. I’m reminded of what developers expected downtown Los Angeles to look like in 2025 in 2015: some colorful graffiti, but mostly affluent yuppies enjoying their new high-rise district. Instead, meth and fentanyl fueled a homeless surge, which the L.A. authorities, unlike Warsaw’s, tolerated.
On the other hand, Polish public enterprises—such as the trains that don’t run on time and the planes that don’t have Wi-Fi—don’t much compare to Austrian government projects, such as Vienna’s superb mass transit system. Viennese public servants come across as descendants of bureaucrats who’d served the Empress Maria Theresa from 1740 to 1780 admirably.
Berlin, however, seems like an unfortunate combination of being flattened by the Red Army and a lack of patriotism ever since.