One day in Bucharest: itinerary and highlights

The Parliament Palace welcomes visitors from morning: built by Ceaușescu in the eighties, it is the world's heaviest administrative building, with over one thousand rooms visitable only partly with guided tour.

From here you travel the Unirii Boulevard, the avenue built to be longer than the Parisian Champs-Élysées, flanked by fountains and buildings of the Communist era.

Moving north you reach the Historic Center (Lipscani), the medieval quarter that survived earthquakes and bombardments, today full of cafés and venues among cobbled streets and restored buildings.

For lunch, the historic center restaurants offer Romanian cuisine dishes like sarmale, cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice.

The Village Museum is the open-air museum that gathers houses and churches in wood from all Romanian regions, reconstructed in the large Herăstrău Park.

Closer to the center, the Romanian Athenaeum is the circular neoclassical hall hosting the city's philharmonic orchestra, one of the nineteenth-century Bucharest's symbolic buildings.

Lipscani establishments, in the Historic Center, remain the evening reference of the city, among the animated streets of urban nightlife.

The Palace of Parliament, the Bulevardul Unirii, and the Old Town make the contrast between communist and medieval Bucharest evident, while the afternoon choice between the Village Museum and the Romanian Athenaeum adds its rural or nineteenth-century side.

The residential Cotroceni neighborhood, with its period villas, and a trip to Peleș Castle, a couple of hours outside the city, remain chapters for a second visit. Seeing Parliament Palace's bulk at the end of Bulevardul Unirii remains the photograph you take away from Bucharest.