New Orleans for The Romantics: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Columned Greek Revival houses behind iron fences and live oaks, Anne Rice's old house among them; walk slowly while the light goes gold.

An Italianate mansion from 1883 whose front gallery is the best place on St. Charles for a cocktail at dusk, with the streetcar rumbling by.

The pink-fronted French Quarter grande dame with a candlelit courtyard. Order the turtle soup and the Bananas Foster, which was invented here, and ask for a table outside.

The narrow rooms where Faulkner wrote Soldiers' Pay in 1925, now a bookshop, with the alley's gaslight outside and the cathedral at the end.

A carriage-house room lit low, with chicken-liver mousse, a glass of rosé and a courtyard; get there before the evening crowd.

Fifty minutes on a wooden bench in an unamplified room, a trumpet and a clarinet and a very old tune; arrive early and you sit up front.

The turquoise-and-white Garden District landmark since 1893; the weekend splurge is Sunday jazz brunch with turtle soup and bread pudding soufflé.

Five minutes across the Mississippi, then the levee walk at Algiers Point as the sky turns pink and the skyline lights up.

A hidden garden behind a corrugated fence, French tinned fish and a glass of natural wine under strings of lights.

The cathedral, the Cabildo and the Pontalba galleries almost to yourselves before the painters set up their easels; coffee from a window.

A bench on the river wall with the Mississippi sliding past and a steamboat calliope somewhere out of sight; the best seat in the city.

Built for an exile who never arrived, with peeling walls, classical music and a Pimm's Cup; the muffuletta is warmed and shared.