São Paulo - Brazil

Just to walk around Rome or Rio de Janeiro is to know what makes those cities great. By contrast, the genius of Sao Paulo lies not in public vistas but private oases: art-house cinemas hidden in lackluster malls, dazzling nightclubs behind unmarked black doors, windowless restaurants that produce their own aesthetic microclimate.

Long Brazil's undisputed economic capital, Sampa, as Sao Paulo is known, has now eclipsed Rio as the cultural capital as well. Art follows money, of course, but perhaps Sao Paulo's blank concrete canvas has had its own attractions. In Rio, you can encounter beauty just by walking outside. In Sao Paulo, one must turn inward and create it oneself.

I come by my love of Sao Paulo honestly. That is to say, I first fell for Rio, where because of the rabid rivalry between the cities, I was systematically taught to scorn all things paulistano.

Nor were my prejudices instantly dispelled when work took me to Sao Paulo for a month this spring. Even the most partisan paulistano rails about the smog, the traffic, the crumbling sidewalks, the gaping chasm between poor and rich. To these complaints, the traveler must add the city's disorienting size, which, combined with hodgepodge urban planning, makes it exceedingly easy to become lost amid a forbidding forest of identikit high-rises.

Quickly, though, I came to understand that Sampa isn't just a place to suffer through a layover. It's also a place to train the eye and ear, expand the mind, educate the palate — and have a rollicking good time.

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