Three days in Philadelphia: where the arguing was done that made a country

The first afternoon is Old City, which is eight blocks of the eighteenth century with a national park draped over it.

Independence Hall is the whole point. It was built as the Pennsylvania State House, the Second Continental Congress sat in the Assembly Room downstairs and adopted the Declaration there on 4 July 1776, and the Constitutional Convention argued in the same room through the summer of 1787 with the windows shut so nobody could hear. The tour is short, a ranger does the talking, and the room is furnished as it was, including Washington's chair with the half sun carved on the back that Franklin could never decide was rising or setting.

The bell is in a glass pavilion a block north. It cracked, it was never rung at the Declaration whatever the story says, and it became a symbol because abolitionists adopted it in the 1830s and named it. It is free, there is no ticket, and the queue moves.

Then walk northeast into the older streets. Elfreth's Alley is a cobbled lane of thirty-two brick houses, the earliest from 1702, and it is the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in the country. People live in all of them, so keep the noise down.

Finish at Christ Church, founded in 1695 with the present building from 1744, where Washington and Franklin had pews. Franklin himself is in the burial ground two blocks west, under a flat stone that people throw pennies onto.

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway cuts diagonally across the grid from City Hall to the art museum and was laid out in the 1910s in deliberate imitation of a Parisian boulevard, with the flags of every country along it. Nearly everything today is on it or a few streets away.

Start at the Barnes. Albert Barnes made a fortune from an antiseptic, spent it on Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse and Picasso before anybody else wanted them, and hung them in dense symmetrical arrangements mixed with ironwork and furniture, with a will forbidding anyone to move a single object. The collection was controversially relocated into a new building on the parkway in 2012, and the rooms were rebuilt exactly. It is one of the great collections in the world and it is hung like nothing else.

The art museum at the top of the parkway is the other one, and yes, those are the steps. Run up them, take the photograph next to the statue at the bottom, then go inside, because the collection is enormous and includes reconstructed rooms: a Japanese teahouse, a Chinese temple hall, a French cloister.

In the afternoon walk fifteen minutes north to Eastern State Penitentiary. It opened in 1829 as the first true penitentiary anywhere, built on the Quaker theory that solitude and a Bible would produce penitence rather than punishment, with seven wings radiating from a central hub. It was closed in 1971 and has been stabilised as a ruin rather than restored, so you walk through peeling cell blocks with skylights and trees growing out of the floors. The audio tour is narrated by Steve Buscemi and is unusually good.

The last morning stays in the middle of town, which is convenient for a train or a bag.

Reading Terminal Market has been trading under the old railway shed since 1893 and is the best single hour in Philadelphia. Amish farmers from Lancaster County have counters here on Wednesdays through Saturdays selling pretzels, scrapple and pie; there are Thai, Cajun and Middle Eastern stalls, two rival cheesesteak queues, and a fish counter that has been in the same family for generations. Go hungry, arrive before noon.

Then across the road to City Hall, which is the largest municipal building in the country, took thirty years to build, and is topped by a bronze William Penn with his back to the parkway. Until 1987 there was a gentleman's agreement that nothing in the city would be built taller than his hat, which is why the skyline changed shape so abruptly in the 1980s. The observation deck under the statue holds about six people at a time and looks straight down the parkway.

Then 30th Street Station or the airport, both about twenty minutes away.