Amman

Amman is one of the most surprising capitals in the Middle East. Perched on seven hills like Rome, 1,000 metres above sea level on a desert plateau, it weaves together with rare fluency the legacy of the great civilisations that have ruled it — Ammonites, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Mamluks, Ottomans — and the energy of a contemporary Arab capital that is open, safe and surprisingly cosmopolitan. In a single day's walk, an attentive traveller moves from the Temple of Hercules on the Citadel (Jabal al-Qal'a) to the Roman theatre carved into the downtown cliff face, then climbs to the pedestrian streets of Rainbow Street for a coffee in a 1930s stone house, before heading back down to the Al-Bukhariyya souk to buy spices by the gram.

But Amman is more than an open-air history book. It is also the Arab city where it is probably easiest for a Western traveller to settle for a few days: taxis are everywhere and cheap, English is spoken almost universally, international hotels meet Western standards, and the café and restaurant scene is in full bloom, carried by a creative, well-educated Jordanian youth. The neighbourhoods of Jabal Amman, Jabal Lweibdeh and Abdoun each offer a distinct atmosphere — bohemian and bourgeois for the first two, residential and upmarket for the latter — which contrasts with the popular downtown (Al-Balad) where the traditional souks still beat. Amman is almost always underestimated by travellers who pass through for two nights before Petra: that is a mistake. Four nights are needed to grasp what this capital has built over the past century, and why it remains, in a troubled region, one of the rare Arab cities where modernity speaks peacefully with its thousand-year past.