Calea Unirii

The reason central Craiova is worth a visit: a pedestrianised street lined with a continuous run of belle-époque facades, the densest in southern Romania outside Bucharest, and all of it built in roughly thirty years either side of 1900.

It was paid for by wheat. The Dolj plain is some of the most productive arable land in south-eastern Europe, and in the decades after the 1870s — with the Danube open to grain export and the railways arriving — it produced a concentration of money in Craiova the city had never had and has not had since. The 1948 nationalisations ended it, and nothing on this scale has been built here in the seventy-odd years since.

The instruction is simply to look up. Ground-floor frontages in any European city centre have been replaced and replaced again; the first and second floors are where the 1900 city survives, and here it survives almost unbroken. Notice the balcony ironwork, the stucco around the window heads, and the way the cornice lines run from building to building at the same height — because this was designed as a street rather than as separate commissions.

Forty-five minutes end to end, free, and nothing on the route closes, which makes it the right plan for a Monday when the museums do. The walk has the route; a short history of Craiova has where the money came from.