DAWN had just broken, and the lost city of the Incas lay empty — not a tourist in sight. From the priests’ district, the high point of the ruins, the bright green central plaza stretched along the narrow summit of a high ridge and dropped precipitously on both sides to a turquoise river thousands of feet below.

In a small chamber two feet from where I stood, the high priest had once meditated daily to seek guidance from his god. In the two-story peaked-roof structures downhill and to the left, workers had dropped off their tools at night — weary men stumbling in after a Sisyphean day of cutting and lugging stones. Beyond lay a panorama of jungle and 17,000-foot peaks. Around me was silence — and isolation.

This was Peru, but not the famous Machu Picchu. I was at Choquequirao, a sister city of similar significance built along similar lines, but harder to reach and, for the time being, still sufficiently free of tourists for a visitor to imagine, without much effort, the priests and builders, the supplicants and courtiers roaming its paths and plaza. Twenty-five years ago, Machu Picchu must have looked much like this.

Choquequirao’s builder, Topa Inca, chose his city’s site and design precisely because of the similarities to Machu Picchu, the city of his predecessor, Pachachuti, according to Gary Ziegler, an independent American archaeologist who worked on the first Choquequirao excavation. The two cities were about the same size and served the same religious, political and agricultural functions. But because archaeologists long underestimated the importance of Choquequirao, the city’s existence was known for almost 300 years before the first restoration was begun in 1993. It is still only 30 percent uncovered. The Peruvian government is just beginning to plan for large-scale tourism there.

In 2006 Choquequirao drew 6,800 visitors, according to Peru’s National Cultural Institute, more than double the total in 2003 but a little more than 1 percent of the number who went to Machu Picchu. For now, Choquequirao remains “an Inca site you can visit without a 60-person Japanese tour group and two tour guides with umbrellas and megaphones,” Mr. Ziegler had told me — a “journey for the savvy traveler.”

I was traveling with five companions: my girlfriend, an Israeli couple who were both Army veterans, a Dutch student and an Arizona bookkeeper turned vagabond. We had coalesced into a group while studying Spanish at a language school in Cuzco.

The first part of our journey to Choquequirao took us to Cachora, the nearest town. It has no direct bus service, so we went from Cuzco by cab — a beat-up station wagon that bumped and twisted over 100 miles of poorly paved road. When we arrived, well after sunset, the indigo sky was dotted with the last twinkles of alpenglow on the snow-covered Salkantay ridge, so impossibly high above us that it was easier to believe they were stars.

We dined at the Terrace of Choquequirao, a menuless two-table restaurant owned by Gilberto Medina, a thin, deferential man who talked to us over coca leaf tea. In the previous year, he told us, the town’s main road had been paved and two new restaurants had joined his. Hotels were under construction, and the first Internet cafe had opened.

In Cuzco before the trip, Pedro Tacca, the director of patrimony for the National Cultural Institute, had spoken to me about the importance of preserving communities like Cachora and the other towns near Choquequirao as tourism to the site grows. He said Peru is trying to control growth and access to Cachora to keep it from becoming another Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu, which is made up entirely of tourist shops, restaurants and hostels, with a railroad track — where the tourists arrive — instead of a main street. “It’s a community without personality,” he said, “horrible in contrast to majestic and beautiful Machu Picchu.”

For now, Cachora still belongs to its residents, farmers whose way of life has changed little in centuries. Invited by Mr. Medina, we went to the elementary school to see a celebration of the Festival of the Virgin Carmen. Children in flannel shirts, wide dresses and colorful mantas (blankets) performed traditional dances, sashaying, spinning and mugging for their doting parents. In the finale, a 25-foot bamboo tower of flammable pinwheels, linked by fuses made with newspaper, set off a shower of colorful sparks. The children tucked their shirts over their heads and ran back and forth under the fiery spray as if it were a playground sprinkler, shrieking with delight.

From Cachora, the trek to Choquequirao is 20 difficult miles in the mountains. Most visitors rent horses, but all of us were in our 20s, and we decided to hike, walking out of town the next morning with mules carrying our packs. The dusty road took us down a quilt of fields and mudstone houses stitched together by lines of outsize aloe plants and shimmery blue eucalyptus trees. Our legs followed the road along the winding cliffs over the Apurímac River, but our eyes stayed fixed on the Salkantay ridge to the north, now appearing in daylight like the snow-capped, protective plates of a massive stegosaurus.

After a knee-crushing 4,000-vertical-foot descent, we spent the second night at a campsite full of pleasant surprises like flush toilets, a shower and cold bottles of Coca-Cola from a woman whose family had trekked them in to sell to tourists. The next morning we embarked on the last and hardest part of the trail: eight miles and 5,000 vertical feet up.

Glad to rest, we stopped after two hours at a three-hut village called Santa Rosa, where in a thatch-roofed store Julian Covarrubias, a baby-faced 25-year-old with a faded Adidas hoodie and a neat goatee, told us he was seeing 15 to 20 tourists a day, and that was plenty for him. Five years ago only one or two a month came through. Sure, he said, he was selling more Cokes now, but his family had been on this land for over 100 years, growing sugar cane, avocados and papayas, had made it through occupation by Shining Path guerrillas in the ’80s, and didn’t want to leave to make way for government tourism projects.

We returned to the arduous trek (which government officials hope eventually to eliminate by building a funicular up the mountain) and at nightfall were setting up camp in the government campground just below the main plaza of Choquequirao. A man approached — 40 or so, with a thin brown ponytail and a button-down shirt left open above a black Tasmanian Devil T-shirt — and directed us to a different spot, saying with calm authority, “I decide who camps where.” He was Enrique Yábar, park chief of Choquequirao.

Mr. Yábar told me that if it were up to him and most of his 24 workers, Choquequirao would remain unknown until more work had been done to limit the effects of tourism. “All of us as inhabitants of the Andes,” he told me, “are directed by our gods, the mountains, and we have the mission to protect them.”

I couldn’t wait until morning to see the ruins, and neither could Avishai, the Israeli man. We hiked up and emerged out onto the open ridge top, a cold wind cutting through our fleece jackets. A wide-winged condor swung on a thermal a few hundred feet away and stopped dead, as if hanging from a mobile. We began climbing stone steps and ducking through ancient doorways like two toddlers on a jungle gym. For a precious few minutes, that ridge top, those 15,000-foot violet hills, those buildings so revered by an extinct civilization, were ours, and our sovereign desire was horseplay.

The next day, after my quiet moment at dawn, we all explored the ruins. Our mule driver knew a little about the site, but for the most part we guided ourselves. I had Spanish-language photocopies of government materials; the one book I had found in English was filled with beautiful photographs and too heavy to tote up the mountain. We saw only six other tourists.

Choquequirao, like all important Incan cities, is laid out in alignment with the movements of the sun and the stars. One building on the central plaza has nooks in which the mummies of important citizens were placed, and it is onto these nooks that the first rays of dawn fall each day.

The city’s central temple is a small rectangle on the other side of the plaza with evenly spaced depressions for altars and stone hooks where the priests hung their raiment. The most striking feature about the temple is how tiny it is; like those at Machu Picchu, it could fit perhaps 20 worshipers and had very little of the architectural grandeur of a mosque, a church or a synagogue. But then, an attempt at human grandeur here, in the shadow of the jagged jungle peak Corihuayrachina and facing arid, domelike mountains so gargantuan they make clouds look small, would seem redundant at best.

Although Choquequirao is more spread out than Machu Picchu, and therefore less photogenic, the promontory on which it lies reaches its zenith with a ceremonial hill behind the plaza, a smaller version of the rugged mountain seen in every photograph of Machu Picchu. The hike up takes just a few minutes but affords a 360-degree view of the ruins and the surrounding landscape. The curious feature of the hill is that it was scalped, flattened and denuded of vegetation by the Incas so their priests could perform rituals there.

On the other side of the plaza, the city climbs steadily uphill following a carved stone aqueduct where water will again flow in a few years as restoration progresses. It soon reaches a zigzag set of terraces resembling a giant’s staircase. Obsessed as they were with building cities on top of mountains, the Incas developed terraces like these to grow crops. Choquequirao has quite a few scattered about, long rice-paddy-like structures imposing angular order on the wild cliffs, but these narrower terraces were special. The priests probably used them to grew the special coca that figured heavily in their rituals. (Modern Andean peoples still use the coca leaf, not to make cocaine but for the mildly euphoric coca tea that appears to occupy the same space in their culture as our coffee, alcohol and aspirin wrapped into one.)

A path from the central plaza leads to the residential district, a complex of newly exposed simple four-walled houses that the jungle is already doing its best to reclaim. The place had a creepy “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” vibe, heightened by the rustling of unknown animals in the brush. That glancing-over-your-shoulder fear, the sort of adrenaline rush you hope for at ancient ruins, is still attainable at Choquequirao.

My favorite structures were the peaked-roof houses between the central plaza and the priest’s section above. Missing only the straw thatch above to be livable (and perhaps a couch or two), they were the largest buildings in the site. Inside one, I lay on my back on the neatly trimmed grass floor and reveled in the interlocking Incan stonework — and the silence. All that day, my group saw only six other visitors at Choquequirao. I could have lain smack in the center of the central plaza, which at Machu Picchu is strictly off limits, and no one would have bothered me.

Choquequirao truly is the lost city of the Incas. In the days of the Spanish conquest, Choquequirao became the principal religious center for the last-gasp Inca state, but its name does not appear in any of the chronicles of the age. Mr. Ziegler theorizes that the Incas did not want the Spanish to know it existed; in fact, they never did find the city. When it was abandoned in the late 16th century, it just shut down, tools left in place for archaeologists like Mr. Ziegler to find hundreds of years later, “like someone just turned out the light and walked away overnight,” he said. The first Westerner to visit was Juan Arias Díaz, a Spanish explorer who arrived in 1710.

Later in the day, I saw a man in a denim shirt and a broad-brimmed hat studying some papers against the low stone wall. I asked him if he was an archaeologist. He shook his head and said something in Spanish that I didn’t catch, and then tried again, saying in heavily accented English, “You know: ladies and gentleman!”

His name was John Chavez, and he was an entertainer hired by the Peruvian government to greet tourists and show them the central plaza. But he was still learning the ropes. Every time I asked a question, he looked down at his notes, which were highlighted and annotated like a high school history textbook, and then gave me an answer that was muddled, incomplete or occasionally wrong.

I found his incompetence oddly thrilling. For all the stories I’ve heard from older travelers about how the great sites of the world felt before they became household names — Angkor Wat, Prague, Machu Picchu — I finally had one of my own: “I was at Choquequirao when even the tour guides didn’t know what they were doing.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

Flights to Cuzco generally involve a change in Lima. Early July flights on LAN Peru from Kennedy Airport in New York were recently available at about $1,110.

Several travel agencies in Cuzco organize tours to Choquequirao with pre-arranged accommodation, transportation, guides and mules or horses, typically for about $300 to $400. SAS Travel on the Plaza de Armas has a good reputation (51-84-255-205; www.sastravelperu.com).

To tour on your own, hire a taxi to Cachora from Cuzco ($40 to $50 one way), leaving early in the day (or the driver won’t want to take you). You can pre-arrange a return with your driver, but it’s not necessary.

In Cachora, stay at the Casa de Salcantay, a small new hostel in a Dutch climber’s highly aesthetic home, complete with tulips ($22 a person per night, including breakfast. www.salcantay.com). Jan Willem van Delft, the proprietor, speaks perfect English and will help you arrange mules and horses ($7 to $10 a day each) and a mule-driver.

Along the trail there are campsites every few hours, some government-run, others belonging to villagers, with very small or no fees. If you don’t like one site, you have to hike a few hours to the next. If you arrange your trip in Cachora, your mule driver will be an adequate guide.

AT a glance, Barcelona's Inopia doesn't look like a place where you'd want to spend much time. More a bar than a restaurant, it's impossibly bright, with white walls and bare fluorescent fixtures. The room is small, irregularly shaped, and — save for one table that's reserved for large groups — there is barely any seating. Almost everyone manages with stools, or leans or stands — some outside, having ordered through the window.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?

Well, let me tell you about the food: Inopia (Tamarit, 104; 34-93-424-52-31) offers the classic stuff of Spain — especially, but not exclusively, Catalonia. That means superb, even precious ingredients, prepared and served simply. The anchovy fillets are insanely good, and an aficionado could polish off a couple dozen. (So what if they're 1.7 euros each? So are oysters.) There are tomato salad with fresh salt cod; Jabugo ham; sliced confited tuna belly; and an extraordinarily creamy cheese (torta Cañarejal) that will destroy any notion of Spain being anything less than the equal of France.

There is nothing at Inopia — which opened last April — that is not at least intriguing. The plates of olives include the tiny, strikingly complex malagueñas. You can order ham croquettes in any tapas bar, but here they are made with jamón Ibérico, and they are vastly superior. In fact all the fried food — artichokes, sardines, potatoes (served with aioli and a lovely little house-made hot sauce) — is just incredible. The frying is done in olive oil, as it is throughout the best places in Spain, and it makes you wonder why — except for expense — this isn't always the case.

The menu is huge (in the style of many tapas bars, a percentage of the menu is devoted to pricey canned goods; more on this in a minute), and getting through it in one visit is hopeless. Actually, if you manage to get the reserved table, you have a shot, because for the 35-euro prix fixe menu, about $48 at $1.37 to the euro, you will be served until you beg the kitchen to stop. Without the prix fixe you will have trouble spending that much money, especially since there is good wine at 2 euros a glass.

The crowd is drawn not only by the food but by the fame: Inopia is run by Alberto Adrià, the younger brother and partner of Ferran Adrià, at this point perhaps the best-known chef in the world. In the summer, Alberto is the pastry chef at El Bulli, about 100 miles northeast of Barcelona, where Ferran is head chef, and his work there remains brilliant. But in Barcelona, in the increasingly hip neighborhood of Sant Antoni, he seems freer, happier and more at home, and he and his partners have created a restaurant that draws locals, friends, chefs and people from all over town (and increasingly the world). Lines form outside the door, but you can eat early, perfect for norteamericanos who don't want to wait until 9 p.m. for their first bite.

La Clara

La Clara (Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 442; 34-93-289-34-60) is a different story entirely. You can sit in absolute comfort, at a table set with white linens, with attentive servers changing your plates and silverware, and for about 40 euros a person, eat far beyond your fill of raciones — essentially bigger portions of tapas — of very high quality and flavor. The upstairs is sleek, bright and pleasant, not unlike trendy American bistros circa 1995. Since this is also the nonsmoking section and, to me, more attractive than the lovely but cavernous downstairs, it's perfect.

I have eaten at La Clara only once (I've had at least two visits to the other restaurants), but if it was not superb, it was very, very good. Like the ham croquettes at Inopia, the fritters of bacalao were perfectly crisp, greaseless and flavorful, an absolute joy; the tortilla (in Spain, this means omelet) with spring onion and bacalao was fresh and moist; tomatoes — with onions and tuna — were better in March than most of ours are in August. A shipment of fresh baby lamb had just arrived, so we sampled brains, kidneys and liver; the last was slightly overcooked by my standards, but the first two were as good as they can be. Some baby goat ribs rounded things out nicely.

The above list only hints at what La Clara has to offer; the menu is enormous, with probably 60 to 70 offerings, and a kitchen that seems to execute them all quite well.

In a way, both Inopia and La Clara serve tapas, but in quite modern settings. Tapas, loosely translated as “snacks,” but far more serious than that these days, probably originated when a bartender offered a few nuts or olives with the drinks he was serving, and went on from there. (Some insist their beginnings were even humbler: that bartenders covered your wine or sherry glass with a plate to keep out the flies, and then began to fill the plate with little free offerings.)

Quimet y Quimet

You can see this tradition, from its simple beginnings to its most elaborate current form, at Quimet y Quimet, perhaps the quirkiest restaurant I know (Poeta Cabanyes, 25; 34-93-442-31-42). A representative of the fourth generation of the Quim family works behind the counter in a space about the size of a standard living room. The walls are lined to the ceiling with bottles and cans, the bottles mostly of wine — some quite inexpensive, some unknown, some famous — the cans, of vegetables, seafood and meat.

(Spain produces what is probably the highest quality and most expensive canned food in the world, and many tapas bars rely on it. Though much of it is good and interesting, for the most part I don't get it, since Spain also produces among the highest quality fresh food in the world. This is as true in Barcelona — which has farms within its city limits — as it is elsewhere in the country.)

Standing in a crowd around the stainless-steel counter, glass of wine or beer in hand, you may get a piece of good bread with some garlicky beans on it, or little assemblies of ham and tuna; mushrooms, butter and tuna; pressed beef with a mix of tomato jam (this, very sweet, is fantastic) and tapenade; bacalao in a few forms; an odd, sort of New Yorkish combination of cream cheese, smoked salmon and honey; a piece of toasted bread with a mussel, that tomato jam again and a spoonful of caviar.

Mr. Quim improvises as many as a hundred types of these montaditos a night, on the spot, from the ingredients spread in front of him. There are also classic tapas like potato croquettes, fried empanadas or cheese with sweet grilled peppers, well executed. The whole meal here — you can spend as little as 10 euros, or as much as 35 (about $15 to $50), even more if you start asking for the canned goods — will take you a half hour and, though tapas are not, in theory, lunch or dinner, it's unlikely you'll go out for a “real” meal after this.

Ca L'Isidre

If you wanted such a meal, however, a likely candidate would be the most classic formal Catalonian restaurant in town, Ca L'Isidre (Les Flors, 12; 34-93-441-11-39). I have shopped at La Boqueria, Barcelona's reigning market, with Isidre Gironés, the owner of Ca L'Isidre, so I can not pretend to anonymity. But I've eaten at the restaurant several times over the years, and I know what's superb and what is less so. The advice, in sum, is this: Order the classics, don't allow the white-jacketed staff to steer you to the French stuff, and you will be bowled over.

For example: the sausages, the head cheese (from bull's meat) and the salamis are terrific. The cigales — large shrimp, served cold — are sensational. Please try the gianchette, fried tiny fish; I arrived in Barcelona after eating these babies in France, Italy, Britain and the United States, and those at Ca L'Isidre were the best. Gaspacho is creamy, with a little fresh fish and a touch of vinegar. Baby octopus in onion sauce, which sounds like nothing, is astonishing: tiny octopi in an intense, dark sauce with a little tomato, white wine, garlic, bay and not much else. A stew of bull meat — marinated for four days, cooked for one, and served on the sixth — contains a variety of meat, some tender, some chewy, some fatty, some lean, all good, in a dark, glossy sauce. Tripe with chorizo and chickpeas, spicy with pimenton, is a common dish throughout Spain; here it's the paradigm.

If this sounds like peasant food, it is, and that's where L'Isidre excels. But the appearance is of a fine dining palace, with beige walls, dark stained wood studded with sconces (they're too bright, but this is often the case in Spain), original and impressive art on the walls, a marble tile floor. It's not creative, but it's lovely and comfortable, and perhaps the best place in town for a lunch that will kill your afternoon or a dinner that will last well past midnight.

Ca L'Isidre is pricey — perhaps 70 euros or more person including wine — but it's not overpriced by any means.

Rias de Galicia

There's another place, where the atmosphere is even more grand, the food even simpler, and the bill even larger: Rias de Galicia, Barcelona's seafood palace (Calle Lerida, 7; 34-93-423-45-70). It's not for everyone. It's almost all seafood, and what's best is the odd seafood; secondly, some dishes cost 50 euros or more, just because what's on them is so rare. But if you want to try berberechos, percebes, espardenyas, teeny tiny squid, and so on, this is the place. Just be ready for a bill way upward of 70 euros a person.

Rias de Galicia's looks are old fashioned and far from stunning, though everything is of high quality, from the table linen to the service. In typical Catalonian fashion, it begins to fill up for lunch around 3 p.m., and for dinner around 10 p.m. (I wonder when Americans are going to start filling these places at 4:30 p.m., pretending they're having a late lunch but secretly craving an early dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I've done it myself.)

Berberechos are small clams, rather stinky — sorry, there's no better word — and once cheap. Now, seasoned with pimenton and oil, they're pricey. Percebes are sea barnacles, simply steamed. You suck the delicious, mussel-like meat out of the shell; they cost a small fortune but everyone who can afford them takes the plunge. Espardenyas — fresh sea cucumbers — are really not all that special, except they're seasonal and rare, and much different from the rubbery stuff you've probably had in Chinese stir-fries. They're served with oil and garlic, no more.

It's not all weird. I ate turbot with fried potatoes, as simple and delicious as it would be in Galicia. A suquet — fish stew — featuring monkfish, shrimp and clams, was intensely flavorful, masterfully done.

There's more in Barcelona, literally dozens of restaurants old and new that are of a quality associated with the best-eating cities in the world. But these five should keep you happy for a short trip, anyway.

OLD-TIMERS always marvel about how much Moscow has changed since the stultifying days of the Soviet Union. That's ancient history. What's really worth marveling about is how much the city has changed in the last year or two. Few places in the world have undergone such a rapid, dizzying and cacophonic transformation as Moscow, and it shows no sign of abating. The gangster Moscow of the 1990s has given way to something tamer, more metropolitan, perhaps, but it is still brash and flashy. The city, like Russia itself, seems to be in search of its identity — embracing the past, though often ironically, while plunging full-speed ahead. What the future holds is uncertain, but meantime, Muscovites are indulging in what an energy-fueled boom has bestowed on them.

FRIDAY

4 p.m.
1) RED SQUARE RISING

A great place to see Moscow's construction revolution is on the edge of Red Square. The city fathers have torn down the old Rossiya Hotel, a giant Brezhnev-era hulk that few will miss, and commissioned a new hotel and entertainment complex by the British architect Norman Foster. The Rossiya's demise has opened the airspace around one of Moscow's most historic places, Varvarka Street. A row of some of the city's oldest churches and buildings has emerged, literally, from the shadows. Among them is the Old English Court (No. 4a Varvarka, 7-495-698-3952; www.mosmuseum.ru/eng/court), a 16th-century gift of Ivan the Terrible to visiting English traders that was restored for Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1994. There is also the Museum of Chambers in Zaryade (10 Varvarka, 7-495-698-3706; www.museum.ru/M415), where the Romanovs lived before the first of them, Mikhail, became czar in 1613. Both are open until 6 or 7 p.m., depending on the day.

6 p.m.
2) BREZHNEV'S BORSCHT

Just opposite, at No. 4 Ilinka Street, is Gostiny Dvor (7-495-698-1202; www.mosgd.ru/ru/mgd/), a neo-Classical mercantile center designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi in the 1780s. It is now a mix of exhibition spaces, stores, restaurants and bars that includes Version 1.0 (3 Varvarka, 7-495-647-1303; www.bcc-version.com), one of the city's newest nightspots, with arguably the best cocktails around. Off the bar are a dance floor, a V.I.P. hall (a Moscow essential) and a “virtual room” with projected images of the sea and snowy landscapes. During happy hour, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., the bar offers two cocktails for the price of one and, on Fridays, features vodka drinks. Try one called Wild Land, with pepper vodka, grapefruit, lime and passion fruit. Version 1.0's cafe serves relatively inexpensive Russian cuisine like borscht, which the menu described as Brezhnev's favorite dish.

9 p.m.
3) CAFE SOCIETY

Moscow is a city of the night, which is indulged with varying degrees of decadence and expense, usually in direct correlation. Bilingua (10/5 Krivokolenny Lane, 7-495-623-9660; www.bilinguaclub.ru) is a multistory bookstore-cafe-debate club-cinema-concert hall that is popular with the university and art-school crowd. Whatever the state of politics in Vladimir V. Putin's Russia, the bohemian intelligentsia seems alive and well, and the drinks and food are inexpensive, with draft beers costing 50 to 195 rubles, or $1.90 to $7.50 at 26 rubles to the dollar. There's live music or a political debate most nights in the second-floor bar.

Midnight
4) GILDED DISCO

A popular new music venue is Ikra (Caviar), a multilevel club in the building of the Gogol Theater (8A Kazakova Street, 7-495-505-5351). The rooms are dim, the walls lined with gilded wallpaper. In the foyer an assault rifle, bafflingly, is submerged in a lighted tank. There are two bars with DJs and a performance hall that features Russian and international musicians. Concerts start at 8 or 9 p.m., but the dance parties continue until closing, at 6 a.m. Admission varies from nothing to 1,000 rubles, depending on the performers.

SATURDAY

10 a.m.
5) IMPRESSIONIST ROOMS

Stalin's government divided expropriated pre-Revolutionary art between two museums. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg may be the granddaddy of Russian museums, but the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is also one of the country's greats (12 and 14 Volkhonka Street, 7-495-203-7998; www.museum.ru/gmii). Famous for its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, the Pushkin Museum opened an annex last August for 19th- and 20th-century art across the street from its main collection in what was the Museum of Private Collections. Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and others now have their own rooms. The main museum holds special exhibitions, like the Modigliani retrospective running through June 17. Admission to each museum is 300 rubles for foreigners; entry to the Modigliani exhibit is 100 rubles more.

1 p.m.
6) PASTRY IN THE PARK

Patriarch's Ponds is an urban oasis (with only one pond, despite the name) not far from the ever-congested Garden Ring that encircles the historic center. It served as the opening setting of Mikhail Bulgakov's mystical Soviet-era satire, “The Master and Margarita,” which tells what happens when the Devil comes to Stalin's Moscow. The streets around it, at least those not covered in scaffolding, still evoke the period — only now there are restaurants and trendy boutiques like Manolo Blahnik. The restaurants nearby (Fish, Shafran, Aist and the charming Café Margarita, named after the novel) are popular, but an inexpensive alternative for lunch is Volkonsky (2/46 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street; 7-495-299-3620; www.volkonsky.ru). A new French bakery with a small cafe, Volkonsky sells delicious sandwiches for only 150 rubles. If the weather is fine, take a sandwich and pastry back to the park and watch the Muscovites stroll by.

4 p.m.
7) SOHO IN MOSCOW

The newest addition to Moscow's thriving contemporary art scene is Vinzavod (1 Fourth Syromyatnichesky Lane, 7-495-917-3436; www.winzavod.com), a 200,000-square-foot exhibition hall in an industrial section behind the Kursk Railroad Station. The 19th-century complex was once the Moscow Bavaria beer factory, later converted to a wine factory, or vinzavod. Though still a work in progress, it is already attracting some of the city's most prominent galleries, including a major portion of the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in March. Imagine SoHo way back when. Plans include a cinema, cafes and clubs; admission to galleries is free.

7 p.m.
8) BEER AND SUSHI

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time, I've been told, when beer was difficult to find in the Soviet Union. Tinkoff, near the British Embassy (11 Protochny Lane, 7-495-777-3300; www.tinkoff.ru/en/), is a measure of how much has changed. It was the country's first Western-style brewery-pub and now has locations in several Russian cities. The mood is festive and the beers abundant (light and dark, filtered and seasonal), starting at 159 rubles for a half-liter. The interior is basic brew pub: exposed brick and fixtures. The sushi is among the best in Russia. Sashimi costs 179 to 319 rubles; the Russian rolls as much as 749.

Midnight
9) JAZZY SKYLINE

One of the most conspicuous landmarks of the budding skyline is the Swissotel Krasnye Holmy (52 Kosmodamiansky Embankment, 7-495-787-9800; www.moscow.swissotel.com), a 34-story glass-and-steel tower, topped with an inverted glass bowl, that opened in July 2005. Inside the bowl is a circular bar, City Space, that has a panoramic, vertiginous view of the vast urban sprawl. The price of cocktails is nearly as dizzying (580 rubles for a whiskey sour), but the sight of the city's lights might bring to mind the jazz classic “Midnight in Moscow.”

SUNDAY

8 a.m.
10) BATHHOUSE THERAPY

A Russian tradition (and great cure for a hangover) is the banya, or bathhouse. Part spa, part social club, the banya exposes the body to extremes of hot (in the steam room) and cold (in dunking pools of various degrees of frigidity), clearing the pores and rejuvenating the soul. The city's most famous banya is the Sandunovskiye Baths, or Sanduny (14 Neglinaya Street, 7-495-625-4631; www.sanduny.ru). There are separate sections for men and women; the men's “high,” or elite, hall has a fin-de-siècle décor of columns, carved wood and brass. Two hours cost 600 to 1,000 rubles.

10:30 a.m.
11) PERESTROIKA LIVES

Izmailovsky Market, near the estate where Peter the Great played war games as a boy, is a sprawling open-air market that evolved out of the first Soviet experiments in capitalism: the flea market. One area has been refashioned into a souvenir paradise, with stalls offering nesting dolls, lacquer boxes, art, antiques, carpets and things you cannot imagine. The market, open weekends from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., is at 73 Izmaylovskoye Shosse, but don't expect to see any sign. Follow the crowds from the Partizanskaya metro station.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Delta and Aeroflot fly from Kennedy Airport in New York to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. A recent Web search showed round-trip fares starting at around $1,080. Brace yourself for a gantlet of taxi drivers outside the airport, some less than scrupulous. Instead, go to the official taxi counters, or order one by phone, (7-495) 788-8889.

The Moscow Metro, which carries about nine million passengers a day, can be overwhelming, particularly to a newcomer, but it is remarkably efficient, especially compared with the city's ever-worsening traffic. Some of the stations are museum pieces themselves. A single fare costs 17 rubles; 10 rides cost 140 rubles.

Hotels in Moscow are pricey and routinely exceed $400 a night, thanks to a dearth of rooms. An exception is the Hotel Budapest (2/18, Petrovskie Linii, 7-495-621-1060; www.hotel-budapest.ru/eng/about.html), a short walk from the Bolshoi Theater, the Kremlin and Red Square. Double rooms start at 5,400 rubles, or about $210 at 26 rubles to the dollar.

A more stylish spot is the Golden Apple Boutique Hotel, part of the Epoque Hotels chain (11 Malaya Dmitrovka, 7-495-980-7000; www.epoquehotels.com/moscow.html). Rates for double rooms start at 7,840 rubles.

The other end of the scale is the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow (3-5 Tverskaya Street, 7-495-225-8888; www.ritzcarlton.com), which is set to open in June. Housed in a former Intourist Hotel, the new hotel will have 334 elegant rooms, starting at 23,000 rubles.

THE battered taxi climbed high above downtown La Paz, clattering over cobblestone streets toward the poor hillside neighborhoods where most of the city's Aymara Indians live. Then, as the pedestrian traffic thickened, I heard the sharp, clear notes of a brass band and clambered out of the cab into a mob of celebrants.

It was 4 p.m. on the last day of Carnaval for the people of the Munaypata barrio, and thousands had gathered in a plaza surrounded by squat brick buildings and dominated by the snow-crusted peak of Mount Illimani, La Paz's sacred symbol. In the center of the square, men clad in outlandishly sequined costumes swigged Huari beer and danced with cholas: indigenous women dressed in traditional black bowler hats and billowing, pleated dresses, known as polleras.

These Ch'uta dance festivities, to which an American expatriate friend had taken me, take place several times a year in the altiplano, Bolivia's high plateau, a barren region of llama herders, desert lakes and impoverished Aymara villages stretching west from the snowy peaks of the Andes. But nowhere is it more colorful than in La Paz, the country's 12,000-foot-high capital.

Here neighborhood associations and social organizations, known as fraternidades, compete to see who can put together the most extravagant costumes, most of which combine references to indigenous Aymara culture with a self-mocking twist. One group, for example, the Choleros, or Players, wore baby-blue vacquero costumes, complete with exaggeratedly flared pant legs and Pancho Villa hats. Another fraternity, known as the Intocables, or Untouchables, had decked themselves out as campy Dick Tracys, with fedoras and baggy orange suits adorned with bejeweled Andean motifs including condors and dragons. Many of the participants wore ghoulish masks with giant ears, bulbous green eyes and yellow beards. “It's all part of our tradition,” one beer-soaked member of the Intocables told me. “We all want to be the ones who get the most attention.”

A generation ago, fiestas like Ch'uta drew considerable attention from a group of young artists in La Paz. Partly inspired by the New York-based Pop Art movement, this circle began producing works filled with playful references to Aymara Indian culture: the festival masks, costumes and brightly colored fabrics that stand out sharply amid the washed-out landscapes of the altiplano. But while the Pop Art scene in New York was soon supplanted by other creative waves, it has never really disappeared from La Paz. And now the unique aesthetics of this city and the surrounding region have begun inspiring not just local artists, but also fashion designers and painters from the rest of South America and beyond.

Noted painters from the United States and Europe have come to La Paz to soak up the city's Andean atmosphere. The British designer John Galliano recently created a line based on the clothing of the Indian tribes of Bolivia and Peru, and last year the Buenos Aires fashion company Tramando introduced tops and skirts inspired by the “warmth, festivities and myths [and] rich chromatic nuances” of altiplano culture. Trixie d'Epanoux, a partner in Tramando, recently referred to La Paz as the Pop Art capital of South America.

The term is a tricky one. To some, Pop Art can refer to both the original Indian crafts and fashion designs — mischievous, bright, cartoonish and often kitschy — and to the evocations of those designs by contemporary artists. Others insist that the terminology can be applied only as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein meant it to be used — “high art” that uses elements of mass culture to make a creative statement.

“There is a marvelous, undeniably glorious repertoire of colors and forms in Bolivia, but they don't deserve the term Pop Art,” said Robert Valcárcel, a celebrated Bolivian artist, who has filled his paintings and collages with indigenous imagery. “I'm not trying to diminish the value of those cultural expressions, but to put them in a conceptual place.” Mr. Valcárcel prefers to call La Paz a “proto-Pop Art capital.”

Whatever one calls it, the sensibility is thriving in La Paz. Mr. Valcárcel is one of a handful of Bolivian artists whose work is widely displayed in galleries in other countries in South America and the United States — and though he moved to the lowland Bolivian city of Santa Cruz from La Paz 15 years ago, he has never really shaken off the altiplano influence. One evening I went to see some of his works at the lavishly decorated home of Patricia Tordoir, an English patron of the arts who has lived with her husband in La Paz for nearly two decades.

The founder of a gallery and nonprofit foundation, esART, in the affluent Zona Sur section, Ms. Tordoir has assembled what may be one of the largest contemporary Bolivian modern art collections in the world. She showed me some of Mr. Valcárcel's cartoonlike collages — a pair of fornicating Lacoste alligators, a Bolivian archangel in a billowing blue-and-orange checkerboard dress, each hand clutching a stick of dynamite (a reference to Bolivia's miners, who are prone to use the explosives both on the job and in confrontations with the government). Ms. Tordoir had also collected works spanning the long career of a Valcárcel contemporary, Gastón Ugalde. His works, including a takeoff of 1980s runaway inflation in Bolivia (a collage of a galloping steed pasted over reams of worthless Bolivian banknotes), are, she says, “the essence of the Pop Art sensibility.”

I visited Mr. Ugalde one afternoon at his studio in the bohemian neighborhood of Sopocachi just outside La Paz's center. A shaggy, bearded collagist, sculptor and photographer, Mr. Ugalde, 60, specializes in what may be the ultimate kitsch art: collage portraits assembled from coca leaf, Bolivia's most lucrative crop. (He forms patterns on the canvas by using the dark green surface of the leaf and its paler underside.)

The ascension in January 2006 to Bolivia's presidency of Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who previously served as the head of a coca-growing syndicate in the country's Chapare region, has dramatically boosted Mr. Ugalde's profile and his fortunes. Shortly after his victory, Mr. Morales commissioned a coca-leaf presidential portrait, which now hangs prominently in the presidential palace along with Mr. Ugalde's coca portraits of Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar. Mr. Ugalde, who made his first coca portrait in 1992, told me that he was drawn to the leaf as an artistic medium because “traditionally we use coca leaf here to communicate. You chew it, you drink, and you talk. It brings people together.”

One of Mr. Ugalde's recent projects consists of a series of striking color photographs taken in the salt flat of Uyuni, eight hours south of La Paz, which juxtapose stark landscapes with uniquely Bolivian cultural artifacts. In one photograph, a transparency of Che Guevara — shot dead by Bolivian troops in the jungle near Santa Cruz in 1967 and still revered by many here — is submerged in the turquoise waters of a puddle in the enormous Uyuni salt flat. In another, Mr. Ugalde has wrapped, Christo-style, a rusting, abandoned mining train in a colorful Andean fabric, transforming a bleak symbol of economic collapse (most of the altiplano mines shut down a generation ago) into a celebration of Andean tradition. “Andeans are among the richest artisan cultures in the world,” Mr. Ugalde told me. “Now the concepts of artist and artisan have come together.”

ONE evening friends took me to Gota de Agua, a popular club for traditional Bolivian folkloric music, where artists, moviemakers and other creative types from Bolivia and abroad go to soak up La Paz's Aymara aesthetic. At midnight, it was packed: an Andean band, playing pipes and drums and wearing the distinctive peaked alpaca caps with earflaps, took to the dance floor, surrounded by Bolivian cultural artifacts — bright murals of peasants in multicolored headdresses, masks of black slave miners with pipes, red beards and helmets (the central motif of the morenada dance, one of the most popular in the annual Gran Poder festival in La Paz). Bolivian fashionistas, video artists and heavy metal rockers mingled over half-liter bottles of Huari beer and danced to both live and recorded Bolivian music.

The night I was there, a dozen young French travelers walked through the door, most of them clad in exaggerated versions of traditional Bolivian fashions — one young woman wore an African-style Moslem cap in alpaca with vertical thin strips in shades of green and gray, and a matching poncho with vertical and horizontal bands of bright colors running into each other. “We love the colors and the patterns,” she told me. Growing numbers of young French tourists were discovering Bolivia, she said, drawn by its Andean aesthetic and its changing politics. “Evo Morales has put Bolivia on the map,” she said. “We like it because it's socialist, indigenous and cheap.”

Just up the hill from Gota de Agua stands another establishment that has become popular among the artsy set: La Costilla de Adán, or Adam's Rib, a bar in Sopocachi. The owner, Roberto Cazorla Guzman, a hair stylist, opened the two-story place in what was his home. He has crammed it with curios and artifacts spanning the past century, some indigenously Bolivian, others “found art” he picked up at a flea market that takes place every Thursday and Sunday in gray, windswept El Alto, 1,500 feet above La Paz.

Mr. Cazorla Guzman took me upstairs and showed off his collection of negritas — black female dolls that originated during the Spanish colonial era when upper-class Bolivian women used African slaves as wet nurses. The dolls, now embraced as symbols of fecundity, are traditionally brought out for La Paz's annual Alasitas Festival. The owner told me that he designed his bar-club as “a house of creative inspiration.”

For all of its dazzling visual imagery, La Paz remains an artistic backwater. Government financing for artists is nonexistent, and the domestic market in this poor country is so limited that even an artist of the stature of Roberto Valcárcel must support himself by teaching. That is what troubles Mr. Valcárcel most about calling La Paz a Pop Art capital — it wrongly implies, he says, both a thriving contemporary art scene and an aesthetic that is “still imitating the New York Pop artists” 40 years late.

As an inspiration for graphic design and fashion, La Paz may be one of the hottest scenes around. But for the handful of local artists trying to survive here, it can be a very cold place indeed.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

American Airlines operates flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and La Paz via Miami. Flights for mid-June were recently available starting at $600, with a two-hour layover in Miami on the way down, and stops in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Miami on the way back.

Last New Year's Eve, Bolivia's Congress passed a law requiring United States citizens to obtain tourist visas, but most Bolivian embassies were not equipped to implement the new requirement, and as of mid-May the law still hadn't gone into effect. Check with your local Bolivian consulate or the embassy to determine what the rules are. The currency is the boliviano, but U.S. dollars are accepted in most hotels and restaurants.

HOTELS

Hostal República (Calle Commercio 145 in the Central District; 591-2-220-2742; www.hostalrepublica.com) is a beautiful colonial-style villa that was once the home of a president of the republic. It's walking distance from the Plaza Murillo, where the presidential palace is now situated; doubles with private bath, $26.

Somewhat more upscale is the three-star Eva Palace Hotel (Calle Sagarnaga 173, Central District; 591-2-231-4885; www.evapalacehotel.com), in the heart of La Paz's bustling tourist district, is just up the street from the Plaza San Francisco. Doubles from $38.

Hotel Radisson (Avenida Arce 2177; 591-2-244-1111; www.radisson.com/lapazbo) in Sopacachi, just up the road from the United States Embassy, is a clean, modern, comfortable hotel with a decent restaurant and high-speed Internet access. Doubles from $180.

RESTAURANTS AND BARS

Bocaisapo (Final Indaburo, around the corner from Calle Jaen, in Casa Verde de la Cruz) is a popular wine bar frequented by La Paz's artists and writers. It features traditional Bolivian music and heated discussions about art, literature and Andean culture at its heavy wooden tables and lambskin-covered benches.

Costilla de Adán (Pasaje Aspiazu 743, between Calle Aspiazu and Avenida Abdon Saavedra; 591-2-241-2318) opened six months ago and quickly became one of the most popular bars in town. Its lively half-dozen lounges spread over two floors are crammed with Pop Art and Bolivian artifacts.

Gota de Agua (Calle Ilampu 837, between Sagarnaga and Santa Cruz), one of La Paz's hottest clubs, features traditional Bolivian music, both live and recorded, in a traditional Andean milieu. On weekends the beer flows and the dancing goes on until dawn. Cover charge varies depending on the entertainment, but isn't more than $2.

Los Tumbos del Sur (Avenida Costanero 60, Seguencoma District; 591-2-275-2037) serves large helpings of traditional Bolivian food, as does La Casa de los Paceños (Avenida Sucre 814; 591-2-228-0955). Dinner for two is $20 to $25 at either.

La Comedie (Pasaje Gustavo Medinacelli 2234; 591-2-242-3561) in Sopacachi, which serves French cuisine, is widely regarded as the best restaurant in town. Dinner for two costs less than $40.

LET'S free associate. If I say Capri, what comes to mind? Glamour, gorgeous views, ritzy shopping — the uninterrupted leisure of la dolce vita. And what if I say Graham Greene? Troubled faith, espionage, unforgiving, “cinematic” realism, seedy characters in sordid places. “Greeneland” can be thrilling on the page, but not many of us would want to go there on vacation.

In other words, there's good reason to assume that the 20th-century British novelist and the sparkling island in the Bay of Naples are mutually incompatible, that the two should never be linked in the same sentence. Greene, typically succinct, had this to say about Capri: “It isn't really my kind of place.”

Once a second home to Roman emperors, it's now a tourist destination, and Greene, one of the most traveled writers of all time, was temperamentally unsuited to tourism: The notion of traveling for fun wouldn't have occurred to him.

And yet he bought a small house on Capri in 1948 and kept it for more than 40 years, returning for short visits, mostly in the spring and fall, until the very end of his life, when he became too ill to travel. The house, Il Rosaio, was a rare constant in Greene's restless existence (“one of nature's displaced persons,” Malcolm Muggeridge called him). In 1978, Greene was made an honorary citizen of the town of Anacapri, and in a brief speech on the occasion, he gave the obvious explanation for his biannual pilgrimage to an island that wasn't at all to his taste: On Capri, he said, “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.”

Case closed. Writers must sit alone at a desk and write — that's the only way the books get written, and Greene wrote a great many, including 26 novels. “The End of the Affair” (1951), “The Quiet American” (1955), “Our Man in Havana” (1958), “A Burnt-Out Case” (1961), “Travels With My Aunt” (1969) — portions of all of these were written in the bare, whitewashed study at Il Rosaio. If you need further proof that the connection between Greene and Capri was essentially utilitarian, consider this: Though he wrote copiously while he was on the island, dutifully turning out his minimum daily quota of 350 words (“One has no talent,” Greene perversely insisted, “I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time”), he never once used Capri as material for his fiction.

But if you go there with his books on the brain, you'll discover the moment you arrive that Capri and Greeneland are not necessarily so far apart. From a distance, as the ferry crosses the wide bay, with Naples and Mount Vesuvius at your back, the island promises the delights of a Mediterranean paradise: dramatic limestone cliffs capped with a thick canopy of trees; a cheerful splattering of houses, white and pastel, climbing up steep hills from a harbor crowded with sumptuous yachts.

As the ferry docks, the brute logistics of day-trip tourism take over: thousands and thousands of bodies flow in and out of the port every day of summer, disembarking in the morning only to trudge back up the gangplank, sweaty and tired, late in the afternoon. The pier, with as many as half a dozen ferries swallowing or disgorging passengers, is packed alarmingly tight.

Greene had captured the feel of this kind of human tide a decade before he first came to Capri. In the opening pages of his masterpiece “Brighton Rock” (1938), he described the holiday crowds arriving in Brighton, 50,000 of them down from London for a day at the seaside, “stepping off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air.”

The air in the Marina Grande is glittering, yes, but not fresh — diesel and sunblock perfume the tawdry scene. Get out as quickly as you can — the title of Greene's second volume of autobiography springs to mind: “Ways of Escape” (1980) — and avoid centers of population until the evening, when the day-trippers have departed.

The vast majority of tourists take the funicular up to the town of Capri, where the modest, winding streets have been hijacked by high-end retail: Prada, Tod's, Bulgari, Gucci. Imagine Rodeo Drive squeezed into the narrow lanes of an Italian hill town and swept by a surging stream of visitors in sneakers and knapsacks, a ululating Babel that circulates in and out of the main piazza like a video on a playback loop.

Others take stubby orange buses and convertible taxis across the sheer face of a cliff and up and around Monte Solaro to Anacapri, the quieter of the island's two towns. It, too, has a touristy pedestrian shopping street, noticeably less chic, that peters out as it wends westward. Piazza Caprile, the small, dusty square closest to Greene's house, could be the center of any ordinary Italian village. No trace here of either la dolce vita or the day-tripping masses, only an optometrist, a fruit and vegetable store and a betting parlor. Old ladies with canes are dressed in black, woolly tights on their swollen legs; children, running home for lunch, wear smocks; grizzled men stand in doorways in groups of two and three, smoking. A spreading olive tree promises that the piazza is as it was and will be.

The street down to Greene's house narrows past the bakery, the hardware store and the self-service laundry. Bougainvillea spills over the whitewashed walls of villas, a cascade of bright flowers, cactus crowning a doorway. Around a bend, a hazy slice of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance is just a shade darker than the cloudless sky. Palm leaves rattle in the breeze, and from farther away comes the sound of unhurried construction. Around another corner is Il Rosaio. Near the wrought-iron gate, a marble plaque erected in 1992 by the Lions Club of Capri informs visitors (in Italian) that this was the residence of Graham Greene, honorary citizen of Anacapri. Two loud American women march by, huffing from their hike; they pass without a glance at the house or the plaque — just about the only visible trace of Greene left on the island.

At the bookstore in Capri, not one of Greene's novels is for sale, either in English or in Italian. Ask for his books and you'll be handed a copy of Shirley Hazzard's delightful, utterly unsentimental memoir, “Greene on Capri” (2000). Ms. Hazzard's affection for her cantankerous friend and his “unquiet, unappeasable spirit” allows her to be at once sympathetic toward a writer she admires and clear-eyed about his prickly personality.

Ms. Hazzard and Greene shared a favorite restaurant in Capri, da Gemma. “The unadulterated simplicity of Gemma's restaurant was a stable factor that helped make the island agreeable to Graham,” she writes. “Like many restless people, he preferred to find his ports of call unchanged.” The restaurant's namesake, Gemma, died in 1984 (and Greene took part in the funeral procession), but her family still runs the restaurant, which remains popular.

Habitually frugal, Greene liked to eat early and catch the last bus back to Anacapri — to spare the cost of a taxi. Much more pleasant to stroll back to the piazza for coffee and a grappa at the Gran Caffè (where Shirley Hazzard first met Greene) and watch the flow of passers-by. It's a place to see and be seen — not even Greene could resist the urge to scope out individuals of interest: He claimed to have spotted in the piazza a “handsome white-haired American gangster, one of Lucky Luciano's men, spending the quiet evening of his days.” Ms. Hazzard assures us that “Graham cared nothing for fashionable life,” but if you enjoy ogling people, the piazza at night is an ideal spot for it. If you need to justify your voyeurism, scan the crowd and say to yourself that you're studying Greene's method. He once told an interviewer, “When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye — which leaves it frozen.”

It's true that enjoying a nightcap and a peek at the pastel parade does seem a long way from what the critic James Wood calls Greene's “Catholic writings” — and from his strenuous and mostly iconoclastic left-wing politics. But Capri is a long way from the cares of the world and besides, the island's tidy Baroque church, Santo Stefano, where Greene occasionally attended Mass, is being restored, the ceiling obscured by a canopy of scaffolding.

If a Mediterranean vacation seems like the wrong occasion to wrestle with Greene's favorite themes, at least one can trace his wanderings around the island. According to Ms. Hazzard, “natural beauty had erratic claim, only, on [Greene's] attention;” he was “a man largely unmoved by visual experience.” And yet his daily routine usually included an afternoon walk, often to the Belvedere Mígliera, a half-hour's amble along a pleasant track through the outskirts of Anacapri, past meticulously tended vineyards, to a lookout perched vertiginously 300 yards above the empty sea.

A walk on the opposite end of the island leads up to the sumptuous Villa Jovis built by the emperor Tiberius. Ms. Hazzard tells of an expedition there with Greene, climbing up though the ruins and looking out over “some of the loveliest scenery on earth.” In the distance, offshore from Positano, are Li Galli, tiny, rocky islands, one of which belonged at the time to the Russian dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine (after Massine's death the island was bought by Rudolph Nureyev). Greene remarked, “the place looks idyllic, but might be hell.” Ms. Hazzard dryly notes, “Graham was inclined to suspect — in some moods, perhaps to hope — that most idylls might be hell.”

After three days on Capri, I came to the conclusion that one can best summon up Greene by defying him, by matching his notorious belligerence with a stubborn commitment to all the pleasures he had difficulty embracing. Rent a little boat and circle the island, soak up the beauty (the big tour boats are cheaper, but if you spoil yourself, you'll enjoy the privacy and the freedom to anchor where you like to swim and sunbathe). Stroll out in the evening to the Arco Naturale, and stop for a glass of prosecco at Le Grottelle (Greene's third favorite restaurant, according to Ms. Hazzard). The secluded trattoria's tables are perched on a terrace 150 yards above the sea, with a view of the Sorrentine peninsula, some three miles away. As the sun sets behind you, it lights up in pink a bank of clouds on the horizon. Across the water, the village of Praiano is a dusting of white on the distant promontory. Later, if you stay for dinner, the darkened sea is mapped out by a constellation of fishing boats. A heavenly idyll.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Ferries and hydrofoils offer regular service to Capri from Naples, Sorrento, Ischia and other ports. For more information, see www.capri.com.

Where to Stay

It is never cheap to stay in a hotel on Capri. If you're after la dolce vita, some five-star hotels will set you back about 400 euros, or about $550 at $1.38 to the euro, for a double room in the high season.

Capri Palace Hotel and Spa, Via Capodimonte, 2b, Anacapri, (39-081) 978-0111; www.capripalace.com. The starting rate for a double room is 420 euros.

Grand Hotel Quisisana, Via Camerelle, 2, Capri, (39-081) 837-0788; www.quisi.it. Double rooms start at about 340 euros.

Hotel Excelsior Parco, Via Provinciale Marina Grande, 179, Capri. (39-081) 837-9671; www.excelsiorparco.com. Less expensive, less luxurious and perfectly pleasant (though noticeably understaffed). Doubles start at around 290 euros.

WHERE TO EAT

Graham Greene had three favorite restaurants on Capri, according to his friend Shirley Hazzard. Dinner for two and a bottle of wine will cost about 75 euros.

Da Gemma, Via Madre Serafina, 6, Capri; (39-081) 837-0461.

Settanni, Via Longano, 5, Capri; (39-081) 837-0105.

Le Grottelle, Via Arco Naturale, Capri; (39-081) 837-5719.

READING

In addition to Shirley Hazzard's memoir, “Greene on Capri” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and Norman Sherry's “The Life of Graham Greene” (Penguin, 2004), there's a solid new book about Greene's fiction — “A Study in Greene,” by Bernard Bergonzi (Oxford University Press, 2006).

IN the movies, love always seems to find its way: opposites attract, the hard-working guy marries the girl next door, and coincidence has a way of intervening at just the right moment. Life doesn’t always imitate art, as Lucille Masone Smith knows, having spent a career helping to create the artifice of film. But sometimes it comes surprisingly close.

Ms. Smith has worked on more than 30 films as producer, production manager or controller for both the big screen and television and divides her time between her Upper West Side apartment and her five-fireplace saltbox house, built in 1710, in the small town of Scotland in northeast Connecticut. She bought the house, with its beamed ceilings, plank floors and 100 acres of lush pastureland and forested hills, for $335,000 in 1986 and uses it as a place of refuge when she isn’t on location or in Manhattan.

She brought in furnishings gathered in her workplaces around the world, like the Fortuny lamps purchased in Venice when she was there in 1994 for the filming of “Only You” with Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei. Her bed is the one that was in Cher’s dressing room on the 1996 film “Faithful.” (Ms. Smith’s acquisition style, she said, is “a treasure a movie.”) Martin Scorsese gave her a bichon frisé that romped over the property. In the silence of the surrounding hills, Ms. Smith marked holidays with her brother and nephews, mourned the deaths of her parents and healed from a divorce.

Then, one day in 2004, she found what appeared to be remnants of crack cocaine use in a shed on the edge of her property. Unsure of what to do, she called a neighbor, Robert F. Brautigam, a former police chief then working as the director of basic training for the Connecticut Police Academy.

Mr. Brautigam, who somewhat resembles the actor Ed Harris, lived across the road in a former hunting lodge on 50 acres. Although their houses were only an eighth of a mile apart, and in one area their properties even abutted, the two neighbors had exchanged only occasional pleasantries. She left a message on his answering machine that began, “Mr. Brautigam, this is your neighbor, Lucille Smith.”

He was away on a vacation — a change of pace for him and an attempt to lighten a life that had been subdued since the death of his wife, Ruth, a year before on the day before their 42nd wedding anniversary. Soon after her funeral, facing heart bypass surgery, he had told his children: “If I die on the table, don’t worry about it. I’d be better off.”

After he returned from his trip, Mr. Brautigam investigated Ms. Smith’s shed and declared that it hadn’t been used in months. Relieved, and learning of Mr. Brautigam’s interest in antiques, she offered him an old safe that had been a prop in “Pieces of April,” a 2003 movie with Katie Holmes. To thank her, he began to leave by her kitchen door vegetables and fruit grown on his property. To thank him, she made a ratatouille. He stopped by and said, in his plain-spoken way, “Look, I don’t cook. But, if you like, I’ll take you out to dinner.”

They married in October 2005. A momentary sticking point was the question of where they would live in the country. Mr. Brautigam wanted Ms. Smith to move into his house. But his father, Frederick, now a lively 90-year-old, gently intervened, saying, “You can’t expect Lucille to live in another woman’s home.” Mr. Brautigam yielded (he still owns the property, however). Ms. Smith suggested that he design his own addition to her place, and their joint history in the saltbox began.

On a bright day in late April, Mr. Brautigam was putting the finishing touches on the new addition, a large, graceful study with recessed lighting, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and space for his collection of 19th-century maps and diaries. The room’s windows overlook gardens and a pond. Outside, the air was spicy with the smell of pine, and magnolia trees bloomed pink and white. Birds crowded the feeders — goldfinches, a scarlet cardinal and an indigo bunting with royal blue feathers.

Ms. Smith made tea in a silver teapot and took it to the parlor, where wood paneling that dates from the Colonial era frames the fireplace. The walls are a subtle rose color done with a technique called ragging, in which paint is applied with a rag rather than a brush. The color matches the border of the Art Deco rug.

“In the film industry, it’s important to have another life because it is so consuming,” Ms. Smith said, and even before she met Mr. Brautigam, she added, “I worked hard to have that other life.”

The house was in good condition when she bought it in the 1980s, but, like any nearly 300-year-old structure, it has always been a work in progress. Ms. Smith hired contractors to replace wood damaged from termites; she replaced every door in the house and had a cedar-shingled roof constructed. After working on the first season of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” in 2001, she had a garage constructed in a post-and-beam design to match the house.

THE furnishings brought home from movie locations are sprinkled around the house. Ms. Smith bought the antique Chinese mirrors while working in South Carolina on “Once Around,” a film in which Holly Hunter falls for Richard Dreyfuss. The silver-framed quotes from Yeats that adorn the kitchen and a bedroom hallway came from Ireland, where she went for the filming of “The Devil’s Own” (1997), which had a cast led by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. Kitchen drawers hold sterling silver from Baltimore, the location for the 1994 film “Guarding Tess” with Shirley MacLaine.

The couple teased each other about all the ways they shouldn’t be able to get along. The list is lengthy. She’s a liberal; he is, he said, “very conservative.” She’s a night owl; he goes to bed early. She’s an urban sophisticate; he likes nothing more than working on the orchards he has planted on his 50 acres.

“Bob had no idea who Brad Pitt was when we met,” Ms. Smith said. “Now he does.”

“And I don’t mind shooting a deer who is ravishing my orchard,” Mr. Brautigam said. “She would put down napkins for him.”

She nodded. “The neighbors say that, as far as the deer are concerned, this is the safe side of the street.”

They laughed every few minutes. Mr. Brautigam, who retired soon after their marriage, tends to the 600 apple trees and hundreds of blueberry bushes on his property. Ms. Smith sells his harvest from a roadside stand and oversees the pick-your-own operation when she isn’t working on a film.

She is still meticulous about furnishings. For the master bedroom, one of three bedrooms and two sleeping lofts in the house, she’s ordered a rug from Nepal.

The dining room is unique. Ms. Smith commissioned an artist, Will Perkins of Ipswich, Mass., to paint the walls gold and then paint a different, delicate Asian scene on each. The walls glow, each looking like a Japanese screen.

When Ms. Smith stepped away for a moment, Mr. Brautigam leaned forward to make a point clear. “I had no desire to live after Ruthie died,” he said. “Lucille saved my life.”

Later, walking near the pond on her property, Ms. Smith grew misty on being told about this remark. “Well, I know he saved mine,” she said.

If movies were like life, they might celebrate more frequently the wisdom of love in later years, the easy affection that laughs at differences and evaporates loneliness. And if life were like the movies, one might cast two unlikely characters — a police officer and a producer, say, and put them on opposites sides of a quiet road, where they would meet out of need and make a life together out of choice.

But, of course, life isn’t like the movies.

AS ski season vanishes to slush in much of the country, it’s only just beginning at Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire. Tens of thousands of skiers, boarders and adventurers from all over the world start arriving there in late April, and work and worry the snowy proving ground until at least June and sometimes into July.

They lug their poles, skis and boards up the mushy three-mile path to the base of the ravine, which lies on the southeast slope of Mount Washington and is one of the oldest, best-known and most difficult backcountry skiing spots in North America. Then they put on their gear, pick a run, climb it, ski it (more or less), then repeat. They come for a range of reasons, from a rite of passage to prove their skiing chops, to a rite of spring they perform with their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

A vast, inverted half-dome, Tuckerman is the kind of place that you photograph with a panoramic lens but still can’t capture. Its volume of snowfall (it averages 55 feet in its deepest spot) and the mountain’s altitude — it’s the highest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 feet — makes the area too dangerous to ski in winter. But it also keeps the snow around deep into spring. It is an anomaly, a piece of the Rockies transplanted back East.

As his friends mowed their lawns and coddled spring flowers one Sunday earlier this month, Jay Wilkinson climbed the steepest ski slope he had ever seen. He had been determined to ski Tuckerman since he moved to Exeter, N.H., in 2002. Last spring, he hiked up in a foggy snowstorm, tried to ski down anyway, and tore ligaments in both his knees.

But this year he came back, on a day when the temperature neared 60 degrees and the sky shimmered bluebird blue. As Mr. Wilkinson ascended, digging his ski boots into the steps left by the skiers above, leaning his body against the slope before him that felt at times almost vertical, he gave himself a little lecture: “There’s only one way down. There’s no steps. There’s no chair lift. You’ve got to get down, or you’re going to fall down.”

When he finally got to his launching point on a giant boulder — and launch is the right word at this backcountry bowl — he stood in line as the skiers before him gulped and jumped the 15-foot cliff that starts the run. Two skiers ahead of him chose good spots, and Mr. Wilkinson, 39, who has been skiing for 20 years in Europe, Utah and the Northeast, made a mental note to imitate their lines. The woman in front of him, sensing his anxiety, gave him some encouragement:

“ ‘Have confidence in yourself! It’s all a matter of just thinking you can do it. Think positive, know where you’re going to make your turn — and watch me,’ ” Mr. Wilkinson said she said. “Then she just shot off and ...wiped out. In fine style, actually. But the pep talk was really useful.”

Normal spring skiing usually involves a little jump at each turn to get your skis around in the heavy wet snow — so-called hop turns. Skiing Tuckerman involves something more like “leap turns.” The best run that Sunday was made by a man who flew several feet into the air before each turn, his skis cutting into the mountainside at such a sharp angle that his cheeks looked to be touching the snow.

THE balmy spring temperatures encourage a more relaxed attitude among the skiers. At the base of the ravine that Sunday, a group of guys stood around playing a game that involved balancing a beer bottle on a ski pole, then flinging a pot lid at it (they had left the Frisbee at home).

On warm days, spectators can be found suntanning on the rocks and watching the ant lines ascend faces of the bowl that have names like the Chute, the Icefall and the Sluice. Skiers make their runs in less-than-wintry clothing, like the man wearing Daisy Duke cut-offs and another who had a rubber chicken strapped to his helmet.

A woman walked up to the gentlemen frolicking with the beer bottle, the ski pole and the pot lid and asked, “Have you guys seen any naked people?”

“Not yet,” one of them replied. “I’m hoping.”

Erin Connery and Ben Siek from Holderness, N.H., Mr. Siek’s skis having broken the week before, repeatedly climbed up the center gully and careered down the hill on a pink plastic toboggan and a neon green snow saucer. Their runs, enacted at terrifying speeds that sent them airborne with each tiny bump, drew echoing hoots and hollers from the spectators lounging on rocks around the bowl. Throughout the day, such cries of approval were reserved for two distinct groups: truly extraordinary skiers or yahoos who looked as if they had death wishes.

Tuckerman Ravine was one of the original spring-skiing spots. It was named after a 19th-century botanist, Edward Tuckerman, who studied the region’s plants. In the 1920s and ’30s, when skiing first became popular in the United States but before chairlifts and rope tows, Tuckerman was frequented by skiers from local colleges like Dartmouth and by members of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

But as skiing exploded in popularity in the second half of the 20th century with resorts, gondolas, restaurants and other amenities to make the casual skier comfortable, Tuckerman became a throwback. In a sport revered by many for its extreme contact with nature, the ravine gives skiers the chance to test themselves against the mountain, with no namby-pamby mugs of hot chocolate waiting if they get tired halfway through the run.

“It’s like skiing of old, when skiing was a really risky thing to do,” said Martin Silverstone, 53, a writer from Montreal who has been coming to Tuckerman for 30 years. “Back in the beginning, skiers were known as wackos. And this goes back to that, because you are a wacko to ski this.”

For a backcountry bowl, though, the ravine has a surprising amount of infrastructure. Two and a half miles up the Tuckerman trail, skiers reach HoJo’s, the Appalachian Mountain Club hut named for its resemblance to a Howard Johnson motel. HoJo’s sells snacks and T-shirts and provides hikers with a veranda on which to lounge and contemplate the skiing they have completed or will be attempting. On a sunny spring day, the area buzzes with activity, as skiers and boarders put on their boots or just take a break from the slushy slog. Campsites and restrooms are nearby, and many take advantage, staying up at the bowl for days at a time.

The United States Forest Service keeps another hut just a few feet away, and several snow rangers, as they are called, provide the most recent reports on potential hazards. It’s another steep half-mile up to the base of the bowl, but even there, the red coats emblazoned with the white cross of the Mount Washington Volunteer Ski Patrol make skiers feel secure, if only in the notion that if they break a leg they won’t have long to wait for a ride down.

Despite the ski patrol, rangers and crowds, the backcountry dangers at Tuckerman are very real. Volkswagen-size chunks of blue ice hung from the headwall that Sunday, threatening to fall and shatter on the boulder field below. The snow rangers post a daily avalanche update on their Web site (www.tuckerman.org), and despite their best efforts, an average of 24 skiers need to be carried out on a litter each year — with the occasional death.

Crevasses and undermined snow — in the summer, Tuckerman is a waterfall — pose additional dangers. And all the infrastructure can give visitors a false sense of confidence. “Yes, if they got hurt, there’s more people here to help them,” said Chris Joosen, the lead snow ranger, “but maybe they wouldn’t do the things they do if they were here alone.”

But they keep coming back. On Jay Wilkinson’s hike up to Tuckerman that day, he had said that he was only going to ski the mountain one day, just to get it out of his system. He would do two runs, he figured, and that would be enough. But as he sat on the rocks afterward in the waning sun, packing his gear for the hike down, he found himself reconsidering.

“My first run was good, and my second run was better; my next run might be even better,” he said. “Even though I said I was only going to do it once, I may have to do it again.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

THE closest towns to Pinkham Notch, which is the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead off Route 16, are Jackson and North Conway. Eagle Mountain House (179 Carter Notch Road, Jackson; 800-966-5779; www.eaglemt.com) is a venerable hotel 15 minutes away. Rooms start at $89 a night. For the full Tuckerman experience, there’s the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Joe Dodge Lodge (Route 16; 603-466-2727; www.outdoors.org/lodging), which sits right at the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead. For nonmembers, the nightly rate for accommodations ranges from $56 to $62.

There’s a good chance that you’ll be ravenous after a day of grappling with Tuckerman Ravine. Shannon Door Restaurant and Pub in Jackson (junction of Routes 16 and 16A, 603-383-4211; www.shannondoor.com) has 14 beers on tap, serves thin-crust pizza and has live music Thursday through Sunday. The Moat Mountain Smoke House & Brewing Company in North Conway (3378 White Mountain Highway, or Route 16; 603-356-6381; www.moatmountain.com) is a brew pub whose beers include Golden Dog Pilsner and Square Tail Stout.