Amsterdam for The Time Travellers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

The city's oldest building, its floor made of some 2,500 gravestones; look down for Saskia van Uylenburgh, then up at the wooden vault.

A 1679 distillery tasting room down an alley behind the Dam; the glass is filled to the brim and you bend to take the first sip.

Dinner inside the 1488 city weigh house, lit by several hundred candles; the upstairs room is where Rembrandt painted the anatomy lesson.

Be at the door at opening and walk straight to the Night Watch; the Gallery of Honour has the whole seventeenth century on one corridor.

The house where he lived and went bankrupt, with the etching press demonstrated daily and the original studio upstairs.

Dutch home cooking in a room papered with photographs of mothers: stamppot, hutspot and apple pie, which is roughly how Amsterdam ate in the century you spent the day in.

Michel de Klerk's 1921 workers' housing with a post office inside; take the guided tour, since the street is the exhibit and the guide knows the gossip.

Weissman's 1895 building with the 2012 composite bathtub hung off it; argue about whether it works, then look at the Rietveld chairs inside.

Eat inside a 1926 municipal greenhouse in Frankendael park, the vegetables picked that morning from the beds you walked past.

The 1903 exchange that ended Dutch historicism: load-bearing brick, exposed iron trusses and ornament only where the structure asked for it.

Jo Coenen's 2007 public library, ten floors of escalators and reading terraces with free entry and a roof café view over the harbour.

A waterside shack of salvaged timber opposite the library; a sandwich and a beer on the jetty before the airport train.