Three days in Ljubljana: one architect's city, with the cars taken out

Start where the city starts. The central span of the Triple Bridge dates from 1842 and had become a bottleneck by the 1930s, so Plecnik added a footbridge on each side, fanned out at a slight angle, and turned a crossing into a small square. It works: the north end opens onto the square with the statue of the national poet on it, and the whole area is pedestrianised, so people stand about on it rather than hurrying across.

Cross to the right bank and walk into the old town. Two long squares run one into the other under the castle hill, lined with baroque townhouses in ochre and pale green, with the Robba fountain and the town hall on the first of them. The lanes climbing off to the right look like dead ends and are not; they lead to courtyards, small designer shops and cafes with four tables.

Go up to the castle in the late afternoon, when the light is on the mountains. The funicular takes a minute from the bottom of the old town, or you can walk it in twenty through the woods. Fortifications have stood here since the twelfth century, though most of what you walk around now is sixteenth century and later, and the tower is the reason to climb: the Kamnik Alps to the north, the river plain to the south, and the whole red roof of the old town directly below you.

Come down for dinner in the old town, and expect large portions.

The market is the morning. It runs along the right bank in an open-air line of stalls, with a covered hall of cheese, bread and cured meat behind it, and above the water a long curved colonnade that Plecnik built to hold it all. Produce, flowers, honey and dried mushrooms; go before noon, and note that Sunday is the one day it does not happen.

Eat standing up afterwards. The Slovenian answer to a quick lunch is sausage and a bowl of soup at a counter, ordered from a machine and handed over in a paper tray, and it costs a fraction of a sit-down meal.

In the afternoon, walk twenty minutes south to the house. Plecnik lived here from 1921 until his death in 1957, in a round brick tower he added to a cottage in a suburban garden, and the rooms are still full of his furniture, drawings, plaster models and books. It is small, it takes an hour, and it explains everything you have been walking over for two days. Book ahead in summer, because entry is by timed tour.

Then, after dark, the other side of the city. Metelkova is a Yugoslav army barracks that was squatted in 1993 as it was about to be demolished, and it has been an autonomous art colony ever since: mosaic-covered walls, sculptures welded out of scrap, a dozen bars and clubs in what were officers' quarters. It is loudest on Friday and Saturday, harmless, and unlike anything else in this very tidy city.

Cross the railway underpass west of the centre and the city stops abruptly at a park. Tivoli runs up a wooded hill, with a broad promenade of chestnut trees, a pond, greenhouses and joggers at every hour, and it is where the whole city goes to walk off Sunday lunch.

The mansion halfway up it holds the museum of contemporary history, and if you only visit one thing in Ljubljana that explains where you are, make it this one. It covers the twentieth century as this country experienced it: a walk-through First World War trench, life between the wars, occupation and partisan resistance, four decades of Yugoslav socialism, and then the declaration of independence in 1991 and the ten days of fighting that followed it, which is as close as this country came to the wars that took its neighbours apart.

Then coffee by the river before you go. Sit on the left bank, where the sun is in the afternoon, and give it as long as the timetable allows.