Imperial City on the Potomac: Washington DC

Thanks to its co-starring role in scores of Hollywood films, the physical elegance of the capital of the United States is usually already well known to many first-time visitors. Or at least it has been embedded their collective imaginations.

Yet, even in the flesh, Washington, DC is a remarkably beautiful city: a strange but pleasant combination of London and San Francisco, with a just dash of imperial Vienna thrown into the white marble mix. What's more, it's a town of surprising contradictions.

There's a distinctive European feel to the place. Perhaps not surprising, considering that its chief designer was French-born architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who grew up in Versailles.

Officially, this ten-square mile diamond-shaped swatch of swampland carved out of land ceded from the states of Virginia and Maryland (with the Potomac River running through it) is called the District of Columbia, in honor of Christopher Columbus. But within a few years of its 1790 founding, the muddy metropolis simply came to be called "Washington's city" - in revered reference to America's first war hero, and first president, George Washington.

What most people know of Washington, from films or from the endless news reports broadcast from here, is the tiny core of the city known as the National Mall. This long green carpet, which could well be considered as America's national front lawn, is encircled with dozens of stately buildings and august white marble monuments. When taken together they give physical form to the immense power and great promise of the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower.

But even beyond the heady atmosphere of the Mall, Washington is an impressive city of broad, tree-lined avenues which branch out from an invisible point in the basement of the US Capitol Building- Washington's exact epicenter. These streets in turn are lined with grand federal buildings of marble and granite. Dramatically floodlit at night, they are spaced apart by leafy green parks and plazas. Here junior civil servants and company secretaries eat low-fat, low-salt, high-fiber, high protein lunches beneath heroic bronze figures astride rearing bronze horses.

Another aspect of Washington that makes it almost un-American is that there are no skyscrapers. Not one. This was due to the savvy forethought of Thomas Jefferson, who suggested that the new city follow the example of Paris and limit the heights of its buildings to a human scale.

The happy result: Even two centuries later, the only structure which rises higher than the Capitol Building, or the 555-foot Washington Monument, is the magnificent National Cathedral, a great gothic shrine that sits atop the crest of a hill on the city's northern edge.

As the sixth largest church in the world, the sprawling structure took nearly 90 years to build; and with its flying buttresses and stone gargoyles, it could easily be mistaken for a grand 14th century English cathedral. Yet, this being America, the largest of its 200 stained-glass windows portrays the Apollo 11 space capsule. And inserted in the middle of this, like a stone thrown by a vandal, is a genuine moon rock carried back from the lunar surface by astronaut Neil Armstrong. And one of the gargoyles on its highest spire carries the face of the Star Wars film villain Darth Vadar, the winning design in a high school competition.

With the notable exception of Moscow, Washington is arguably the world's greenest capital. Its celebrated pink cherry trees (6,000 today from Japan's original gift of 2,000 in 1912) are the local favorites, but Washington's unique geographic location, midway between north and south, also means that magnificent southern magnolias and towering northern elms often flourish on the same streets.