turizmus

THE wine bar is a simple idea, yet it can be fraught. A wall of unfamiliar labels, obscure descriptions and extravagantly wine-schooled patrons can evoke a nagging vertigo.

But in San Francisco, a city known for both its casual culture and obsession with quality food and drink, a visit to a wine bar can be an unpretentious pleasure. The city has long had wine bars — the London Wine Bar, downtown, opened in 1974 and is said to have been the first in the United States. Now, a wave of new wine bars has been opening, often in unexpected neighborhoods.

I met with Alder Yarrow, the obsessive and opinionated writer behind vinography.com, a blog that exhaustively chronicles San Francisco's wine bars. We sat at the long zinc bar at Nectar (3330 Steiner Street; 415-345-1377; www.nectarwinelounge.com), a wine bar in the Marina District. The place was just starting to fill up, and summer evening light flooded the tall, narrow space.

After I ordered a taste of 2005 Alois Lageder pinot grigio ($4) — was that a smirk I caught over my choice? — Mr. Yarrow got down to business. “May I see that?” he asked, and I handed him my copy of Zagat San Francisco.

He turned to the list of 45 wine bars in the back and began editing: “Not a wine bar ... not a wine bar ... wine bar ... wine bar ... why isn't the Bubble Lounge on this list? Champagne is wine too!”

Our server offered us a number of tastes before I settled on a glass of red, a 2004 Le Clos du Caillou ($12), and Mr. Yarrow explained his system. “A wine bar has to serve wine by the bottle,” he began, “and by the glass and the taste. It can't be a regular bar that also has wine. It can be a restaurant, but there has to be a separate seating area for wine drinking only. And it has to have more than a few wines — at least five — in a changing list. And it can't be a retailer with a small tasting area in the corner.”

It is a testament to the vibrant scene in San Francisco that even as he was ruthlessly crossing out those that did not meet his criteria, Mr. Yarrow effortlessly added eight wine bars to the list in my 2007 Zagat.

I was glad to have Mr. Yarrow on hand, but my own predilections are more pedestrian: I like drinking good wine in a convivial atmosphere. I love it, actually, yet I would be hard pressed to pontificate at length about terroir, vintage or varietal.

A retail element is a feature of many of San Francisco's wine bars. California liquor laws are famously reasonable, and many wine bars offer carryout bottles. It's also perfectly acceptable to drink half a bottle, then stick the cork in and walk out with the rest. Indeed, you can walk to a nearby restaurant, most of which have friendly corkage policies. (Still, there is an etiquette to it: don't bring in cheap wine, or wine on the restaurant's list, and if you bring an exceptional bottle, it's polite to offer the sommelier a taste.)

The Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant (One Ferry Building, Shop 23; 415-391-9400; www.fpwm.com) is two-thirds wine shop (any bottle from the shop can be enjoyed in the wine bar for a $6 corkage fee). The Wine Merchant is in the Ferry Building, that mecca of all things local and organic. Shoppers bustle past in a light-filled interior space, on their way to pick up local goat cheeses and rare olive oils.

I met some friends, easily lured away from nearby offices, and prevailed upon them to start with a pinot gris/grigio flight (three two-ounce glasses for $10). The light grapiness went well with our eclectic lunch of cheese, salami, tamales and samosas foraged from the teeming Tuesday farmers' market at the Ferry Building.

Our server was patient and helpful, and pushed my wine education forward with a glass of mystery white. It was sweet, almost meady, and turned out to be a New Zealand chenin blanc from Milton ($25). We finished with a bottle of the Wine Merchant's own California chardonnay ($14) and bought a bottle of the Milton ($19) to take with us.

Hôtel Biron (45 Rose Street; 415-703-0403; www.hotelbiron.com) is tucked on a back alley near a cluster of restaurants on Market Street. One would be forgiven for thinking it a bar bar upon entering. The walls of the small, moody space are dark-painted brick, hung with art of the energetic Mission School. Alt rock plays loudly, and low seats cluster in nooks around tiny tables crowded with big wine glasses.

I visited with a large and unruly crew that included both wine enthusiasts and rank amateurs. The bar does not offer tastes, but the owner, Chris Fuqua, was patient and generous with our high-maintenance group. From his station in the back, he eventually splashed out nearly 20 small samples before we ordered our first bottle — a 2004 Agricola Cueso nero d'Avola from Sicily ($27) that was delightfully tart and fruity. We skipped the selection of excellent cheeses, fruits and nuts, although we probably shouldn't have.

The surest sign that wine bars in San Francisco are branching in new directions is last year's opening of Yield (2490 Third Street; 415-401-8984; www.yieldsf.com), in Dogpatch. This previously decrepit postindustrial neighborhood at the edge of the bay now has not just a wine bar, but one specializing in organic and biodynamic wines.

Yield is jointly owned by Chris Tavelli, formerly the sommelier at Millennium, a highly regarded vegan restaurant. (It shows in Yield's compact and sublimely executed menu: at $9, the olive cashew mushroom flatbread was worth the trip all on its own). The airy space of tastefully rough materials draws the eclectic crowd of a sophisticated neighborhood bar.

With Johnny Cash melding into free jazz and downtempo, I finally worked past my pinot grigio problem. The one I tasted at Yield, McFadden 2005 from Mendocino ($3 for two ounces), was peary and full enough, but I was set straight by a glass of Australian 2006 Yalumba viognier ($8). Or was it the cool, almost minty 2006 Château de Lascaux rosé from Languedoc ($9)? It might even have been the 2003 Domaine de Tavernel Passerel ($8).

At any rate, nobody smirked. And if they did, I didn't notice — or care.

FOR the last few years, Queen Street West has been the epicenter of Toronto cool — with its trendy restaurants, night-crawling club kids and boutique clothing shops featuring the work of local designers. But now the action seems to be shifting a few blocks over, to a part of the street nicknamed — accurately but awkwardly — West Queen Street West.

This still-evolving neighborhood starts roughly at the intersection of Queen Street West and Bathurst, and is marked by the presence of St. Christopher House (588 Queen Street West), a former bank turned community center for the city's newly arrived immigrants and working poor, now an adult drop-in center and arts-and-crafts center.

Indeed, this strip of Queen Street West still has a slightly seedy side, from the run-down diners selling all-day breakfasts to the somewhat startling presence of the live go-go dancer in the storefront window of Misbehav'n (No. 650), an “adult” lingerie and fetish store that seems to have a devoted clientele.

But more representative of the neighborhood's new prominence are the many restaurants, cafes and art galleries that make this a lively spot to spend a weekend afternoon.

From Czehoski (No. 678; 416-366-6787), a spare but elegant restaurant set in what was once a Polish butcher shop of the same name, to Little Tibet (No. 712; 416-306-1896), a tiny spot that specializes in momos — handmade dumplings with fillings ranging from beef (10.50 Canadian dollars, about 9.95 U.S. dollars, at 97 cents to the Canadian dollar ) to spinach and cheese (10.95 Canadian dollars) — West Queen Street West offers strollers a global tasting menu.

Among the more inviting spots on the street is Bar One (No. 924; 416-535-1655), a friendly Italian cafe where a steady stream of locals comes in for Saturday brunch to chat with the laid-back staff about last night's date or tonight's club outing.

If it's just a restorative snack you're after, delicious lemon tarts (3.05 Canadian dollars) from Clafouti Patisserie et Café (No. 915; 416-603-1935) might do the trick. Or perhaps head to Red Tea Box (No. 696; 416-203-8882) for its Asian spin on afternoon tea. The “tea bento” features several offerings, including the yuzu sencha (25 Canadian dollars), which includes a lime pistachio cake, chocolate candied yuzu tart and “citrus-blue ginger cured salmon with avocado and kumquat dressing,” along with the requisite pot of tea.

But it isn't all food and drink on West Queen Street West.

Anchored by the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Mocca) (No. 952; 416-395-0067; www.mocca.toronto.on.ca), which moved to this part of town in 2005, the neighborhood has become an increasingly popular spot for local gallery owners. Among the notable spaces: Angell Gallery (No. 890; 416-530-0444); Galerie Lausberg (No. 880; 416-516-4440); the Propeller Center for the Visual Arts (No. 984; 416-504-7142); and the *new* gallery (No. 906; 416-588-1200), opposite a former candy factory now turned into loft apartments.

Visitors looking for some interesting pieces to liven up their living rooms back home can find antique teak dining tables and daybeds from Java and gorgeous curtains from India at Rumah (No. 668; 416-703-4594).

Though locals will tell you that West Queen Street West extends all the way down to Gladstone Street, where the oh-so-hip Gladstone Hotel opened in late 2006, walking any farther than the intersection of Ossington and Queen Street West is an exercise in diminishing returns — with appliance stores more numerous than trendy cafes.

This part of this street, it seems, is still waiting for its own renaissance. Maybe they'll call it Western West Queen Street West.

Archive Photos

It’s 1977 New York in a “Saturday Night Fever” rental.

TRAVELING is fun, except for the traveling part. If you live in Alaska or North Dakota or somewhere else where dashing to New York for the weekend seems a bit extravagant in these days of six-hour runway waits, it’s time to bring the city to you. (And not just in the form of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Clinton.) We’re talking about a weekend in a virtual New York City, a k a your own home.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you live in a suburban house, own a car, belong to Netflix and have the disposable income to pay $4 for a bagel. Adjust as necessary.

THE MENU

Friday dinner: Consider all the great New York dishes you could whip up at home — something from Danny Meyer and Michael Romano’s “Union Square Cafe Cookbook,” a Peter Luger-quality porterhouse, a big fat hot pastrami on rye. But just consider it, because cooking is out of the question. Order in Chinese.

Saturday breakfast: Order H & H bagels in advance via Federal Express from www.hhbagels.com. They’re pricey — two dozen for $59.95, delivery included, but they arrive in a state approximating fresh. (Sticker shock is part of the experience, anyway; they cost $1.10 each in New York.) Optional: Smoked salmon from Zabar’s: $42 a pound, plus shipping.

Saturday lunch: Find the nearest Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs, which started in Coney Island but is now in 19 states. Eat a “bigger than the bun” dog, or go for Joey Chestnut’s record of 66 wieners in 12 minutes.

Saturday dinner: Order in pizza. Eat. When just scraps are left, release live cockroaches into the pizza box. (Cockroaches are available at www.wardsci.com; 10 for $19.95 or 50 for $79.99.)

Sunday brunch: Laze around the apartment and think about going to the gym, until you’re really, really hungry. Then head to your favorite pancake or omelet spot. Instead of walking right in, wait outside for at least 45 minutes, simulating the typical brunch wait in Manhattan.

ACTIVITIES

Check which weekends the Yankees and Mets are in town in September (Kansas City, Boston and Baltimore for the Yankees; Florida and Atlanta for the Mets); get tickets if you can. If not, try a classic New York City street game like stickball. The rules are at www.streetplay.com.

If you’re more cultured, scrutinize listings for Broadway road shows, or theater with New York themes (see westsidestory.com for coming dates in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Atlanta, among others). Or, just load up on DVDs of films and television series that ooze New York mood.

The Times critic A. O. Scott suggests (among others): “The Squid and the Whale” (2005), “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), “The Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) and “Raising Victor Vargas” (2002); Manohla Dargis chimes in with “Taxi Driver” (1976), “The Panic in Needle Park” (1971), “The Apartment” (1960) and “Crooklyn” (1994).

In addition, entire seasons of “Seinfeld,” “The Jeffersons,” “The Honeymooners” and more are available on Netflix.

In between, check out Webcams of what’s actually going on in New York. Earthcam.com includes 11 angles of Times Square and those zany Central Park Zoo penguins. And tune in (on your computer) to New York radio streamed over the Internet. Everything from the NPR affiliate WNYC to New York’s leading Spanish-language station, La Mega (WSKQ-FM) is available.

CREATING THE CLIMATE

The real key to your weekend is going to be the little intangibles that make New York New York, and everywhere else merely everywhere else. (Those cockroaches were a great start.)

First, with private parking spaces selling for six figures in Manhattan, move your car out of the garage or driveway and onto the street. What time would you usually get up on Saturday? Take that hour (say, 9 a.m.), subtract two hours and five minutes and set your alarm. At 6:55 a.m., jolt awake, run outside in scandalously ratty or revealing clothing, and move your car to the other side of the street to simulate compliance with alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules. If it’s not moved by 7 a.m. sharp, donate $45 to your favorite “Victims of NYC Traffic Police” charity.

Then, there’s your place. It’s too big. New York is all about being cramped. So rope off half the house (maybe with yellow barricade tape) and, if you have children, force them to share a room. Optional: Using cellphones or walky-talkies, rig up a live feed from your neighbor’s house into yours. This should simulate the thin walls of a typical Manhattan apartment.

A weekend in virtual New York can be exhausting, so by the time Sunday night rolls around, you’re ready to call it quits. No such luck. Call your local fire department and see if they’re willing to break out the hook and ladder and have it go careering past your bedroom window, sirens blaring, horns honking — 4:30 Monday morning sounds just about right.

ON FILM

Two New York Times film critics suggest a baker’s dozen of films to bring that New York state of mind to your living room.

A. O. Scott

“The Plot Against Harry” (1970)

“Across 110th Street” (1972)

“Saturday Night Fever” (1977)

“Our Song” (2000)

“Raising Victor Vargas” (2002)

“The Squid and the Whale” (2005)

Manohla Dargis

“The Apartment” (1960)

“The Panic in Needle Park” (1971)

“Mean Streets” (1973)

“Taxi Driver” (1976)

“Escape From New York” (1981)

“Crooklyn” (1994)

Both

“The Sweet Smell of Success” (1957)

A 2004 Notte Bianca event at the Colosseum in Rome.

WHEN Paris held its first Nuit Blanche — a frenetic all-night, multivenue cultural bash — in 2002, few could have imagined that five years later White Night fever would be sweeping Europe’s capitals, and spreading to other cities.

From Rome, which will hold its fifth White Night on Sept. 8, to Madrid (Sept. 22), Toronto (Sept. 29), Brussels (also Sept. 29), Paris and La Valletta, Malta (Oct. 6) and dozens of other cities, collective insomnia is in, at least for one night a year.

Between opera recitals, jazz jam sessions, contemporary-art shows, circus acts, theatrical declamations and postmodern installations, the offerings are endless.

In Europe, the initiative has been so successful that several cities have formed a consortium, White Nights Europe, to time their all-night parties on successive weekends. In a perfect, newly unified European world, partygoers would migrate from one capital to the other, dancing the night away.

“That was the idea of banding together, to boost tourism,” said Giovanna Marinelli, who heads the municipal department in Rome that is responsible for cultural policies. The capital alliance — which was formed last year — has also allowed organizers to exchange organizational tips as well as promote the other White Night events.

Technically, a White Nights Europe Charter binds these capitals (Paris, Rome, Riga, Brussels, Madrid and, starting this year, Bucharest) to respect certain tenets, including that events will be free and will be organized throughout a city, not just in its center. But a lot depends on cash flow and local ambitions.

“We all try to respect the rules, but each country does it in its own way,” said Esther Beck, the main coordinator of the Nuit Blanche in Brussels. “In Rome and Paris, the budgets are bigger so they tend to have more spectacular events.”

The European White Nights cities are also supposed to share a common artistic project, which this year is the creation of a “lounge” area in the heart of each city. In Rome, organizers will recreate an Italian garden in the Piazza Capranica, near the Pantheon, that will adhere to a Renaissance model.

The lounge is meant to be an oasis of calm amid the turmoil that is sure to sweep Rome’s center: past editions of the White Night have brought as many as two million people into the streets, according to organizers. “It will be a decompression area where people can relax,” said Ms. Marinelli of the outdoor Roman lounge.

Some respite may also be found in the city’s museums and art galleries, many of which remain open around the clock.

For its lounge area, Madrid will set up a patio in the Conde Duque Cultural Center, one of the event’s main sites. It will be a truly pan-European project: The space will be designed by a group of young Madrilenian architects called Basurama, working with recycled materials (basura means rubbish in Spanish); a Dutch group will be on hand to customize second-hand clothes; a British collective will project short films by European filmmakers; and the music — electronic mostly — will be performed by various European musicians.

Each city also has its own theme, which “responds to the cultural vocation and history of the city,” Ms. Marinelli said. In Rome, the chosen theme is Italy’s nascent multicultural society, with more than 1,000 artists from 29 countries participating.

Brussels settled on two themes: a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which founded the European Union (as the European Economic Community), and the intriguing-sounding “Seven Capital Sins.”

“It’s a play on words,” said Ms. Beck, who explained that artists were asked to create works of art that revealed “the sins of the city — like pollution, noise, aggressiveness, violence.”

Despite the sobering theme, it should not be gloomy, with all-night dancing in unusual spots like a train station, the Gare du Congrès.

Brussels was one of the first cities to follow Paris’s lead, holding its first White Night in 2003. Past editions have been very successful “as long as there’s no rain,” Ms. Beck said.

Details about the Parisian Nuit Blanche are still scarce. What little emerges on the Paris event’s Web site (www.nuitblanche.paris.fr) is that the axis of the events will follow the course of the No. 14 Métro line, from the Batignolles neighborhood in the northwest part of the city through the city center to Les Olympiades in the southeast.

In Toronto, the second annual Nuit Blanche (www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca), like the first, will highlight contemporary art, with three curators and 195 projects scheduled to light up the night on Sept. 29. “We wanted to provide an opportunity for the arts community to show what it’s up to and what artists are creating,” said Marilyn Nickel, a spokeswoman for the city.

Toronto joined the White Night fray after a visit from Paris city officials who ended up assisting with logistics and organization.

“They were very helpful when it came to things like audience response or security,” Ms. Nickel said. “They had expertise regarding things that work and things that don’t work, they brought all that to the table. It’s a massive undertaking, working with so many partners to bring it all together, but when it all happens it’s magical.”

As the festivals have multiplied, in many cases so have the offerings in each city. In Rome, the first White Night festival in 2003 presented 100 events. This year, there are 400.

In Brussels (www.nuitblanche07.be), on the other hand, organizers have taken the opposite tack, halving the events sponsored last year to a neat 100.

“There were too many to choose from last year,” said Ms. Beck in a telephone interview. “People missed out on a lot. It’s impossible to do everything.”

Rome (www.lanottebianca.it) is trying to capitalize on the all-night party’s potential tourism draw by planning a full program of events for the weekend. These include a concert by the Italian pop icon Lucio Dalla at the Villa Borghese and a reading from “The Aeneid” — in Italian — on the Piazza del Campidoglio (City Hall) on Friday evening, Sept. 7, as a sort of curtain raiser.

“It’s another way to promote tourism that worked very well when we first tried it last year,” Ms. Marinelli said. Spreading the events over two days “was also a good way of decongesting” the city.

Statistics on people who travel specifically for the White Nights are not available. But recent turnouts suggest that the formula works. That’s why in Italy, at least, dozens of Italian cities, including Genoa, Naples, Milan and many smaller tourist hubs like Verbania and Viterbo have begun their own all-night festivals.

“The White Night is more than the sum of several concerts or plays or performances,” said Francesco Moltoni, the city official responsible for event planning in Viterbo. “It’s the best way to get people to rediscover their city.”

VANITY OR ART A Dior show in Paris in February. New York Fashion Week begins on Tuesday.

DEPENDING on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts.

With Fashion Week beginning in New York on Tuesday — the start of a twice-yearly, monthlong cycle of designer presentations on two continents and in four cities that will showcase hundreds of individual designers — it is worth asking why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride.

“Everyone” is not here intended to imply the deeply initiated, those pixie-dust people for whom the shape of a dress or the cut of a sleeve is a major event. There is certainly a place for those types, whether they are cuckoos like the late fashion editor Diana Vreeland (who once wrote, “I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them”), or extravagant mythomaniacs like John Galliano, the Dior designer — who plays a pirate one season, a gypsy the next — or even the young celebrity brand pimps who would probably be offering paparazzi a lot more gratuitous crotch shots if designers didn’t provide them with free clothes.

No, everyone means the rest of us, those who scorn fashion outright and those who don’t but who nevertheless have the uneasy sense that this compelling world of surfaces and self-presentation is unworthy of regard.

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

“Of course, I love it also,” Ms. Prada added, and her reason said a lot about why fashion is a subject no one should be ashamed to take seriously. “Even when people don’t have anything,” Ms. Prada said, “they have their bodies and their clothes.”

They have their identities, that is, assembled during the profound daily ritual of clothing oneself; they have, as Colette once remarked, their civilizing masks. And yet, despite its potential as a tool for analyzing culture, history, politics and creative expression; as a form of descriptive shorthand used through all of written history (including the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran); as a social delight, fashion is just as often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Politicians are far from the only people who act as though the concerns of fashion are beneath consideration. When the Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died recently, film critics and obituary writers went into raptures about his classic “L’Avventura,” a movie few people outside of cinema studies classes are likely, at this point, to have seen. Some remarked that the Antonioni of that early film had already begun losing his edge by the time he detoured into films like “Blowup,” whose plot revolves around the fashion world.

Never mind that “L’Avventura” is a sharply stylish movie and that in Antonioni’s hands wardrobe does the work dialogue would for more talk-prone directors. Absent plot, clothes are used by Antonioni to frame the mood of upper-class anomie and to make graphically his distaste for the Italian neorealists, who all seemed to have costumed their movies using the same set of Anna Magnani’s hand-me-downs.

Like most Italians then and now, Antonioni had a sympathy for the role clothes play in human theater. And while “Blowup” is set in a fashion (or “mod”) milieu, it is less about fashion, really, than about an accidentally photographed murder and the instability of what is seen and known. Even 40 years on, the film’s surfaces remain so stylishly assured and so cool they automatically arouse intellectual suspicion. Trusting in appearances, Antonioni always seemed to suggest, may be a losing proposition.

But investing in them, as Ms. Steele said, can be far worse.

“In our deeply Puritan culture, to care about appearance is like trying to be better than you really are, morally wrong,” she said.

It is to be driven by the dictates of desires and not needs. And yet the appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined. Luxury, and not necessity, may be the true mother of invention, as the writer Henry Petroski observed. This proposition is an easier sell when the luxury in question is an iPhone, and not a Balenciaga handbag, but the same principles hold.

In places like Silicon Valley the quest for newer and better stuff results in technology patents, a clear measure of economic robustness. Fashion innovations may be harder to patent or track, but it seems obvious that huge sectors of the New York City economy would churn to a halt if all the Project Runway types suddenly stopped migrating here in the belief that the world could be changed by the sort of innovation inherent in how a garment is cut.

“Fashion is so easy to hate,” said Elizabeth Currid, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press).

“Cultural industries like fashion are sometimes seen as something only the skinny girls in high school think about,” said Ms. Currid — and less often as a fascinating field for cultural study and also the bill-payers keeping thousands of seamstresses, cutters, pattern makers, truckers, real estate brokers and publicity hacks employed.

Analyzing Bureau of Labor statistics, Ms. Currid arrived at the not-altogether-startling conclusion that the densest concentration of fashion designers in the United States is in New York. A glance at the roster of foreign designers showing at New York Fashion Week, Sept. 4 through 12 — Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil are represented — suggests a good reason for that.

“Even if, on some level, fashion is fantasy, the concentration of events that go into producing it and the resulting social spillover,” as Ms. Currid said, can result in a huge cumulative economic advantage for a city. While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision, enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes.

One of the most startling findings of her research, Ms. Currid said, was how powerful something as superficial, girly, bourgeois, unfeminist, conformist, elitist and frivolous as fashion can be in creating the intangible allure that attracts money, talent, beauty and enterprise to cities.

“How does one place make itself different from another in a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner?” she asked. “People have to believe that this is the place to be.” Fashion has that effect.

THE WORLD WITHOUT US

By Alan Weisman.

Illustrated. 324 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.

When Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published in 1963, the chemical giant Monsanto struck back with a parody called “Desolate Spring” that envisioned an America laid waste not by pesticides but by insects: “The bugs were everywhere. Unseen. Unheard. Unbelievably universal. ... On or under every square foot of land, every square yard, every acre, and county, and state and region in the entire sweep of the United States. In every home and barn and apartment house and chicken coop, and in their timbers and foundations and furnishings. Beneath the ground, beneath the waters, on and in limbs and twigs and stalks, under rocks, inside trees and animals and other insects — and yes, inside man.”

To Alan Weisman, this nightmare scenario would be merely a promising start. In his morbidly fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller, “The World Without Us,” Weisman imagines what would happen if the earth’s most invasive species — ourselves — were suddenly and completely wiped out. Writers from Carson to Al Gore have invoked the threat of environmental collapse in an effort to persuade us to change our careless ways. With similar intentions but a more devilish sense of entertainment values, Weisman turns the destruction of our civilization and the subsequent rewilding of the planet into a Hollywood-worthy, slow-motion disaster spectacular and feel-good movie rolled into one.

A journalist and author of three previous books, Weisman travels from Europe’s last remnant of primeval forest to the horse latitudes of the Pacific, interviewing everyone from evolutionary biologists and materials scientists to archaeologists and art conservators in his effort to sketch out the planet’s post-human future. In even the most heavily fortified corners of the settled world, the rot would set in quickly. With no one left to run the pumps, New York’s subway tunnels would fill with water in two days. Within 20 years, Lexington Avenue would be a river. Fire- and wind-ravaged skyscrapers would eventually fall like giant trees. Within weeks of our disappearance, the world’s 441 nuclear plants would melt down into radioactive blobs, while our petrochemical plants, “ticking time bombs” even on a normal day, would become flaming geysers spewing toxins for decades to come. Outside of these hot spots, Weisman depicts a world slowly turning back into wilderness. After about 100,000 years, carbon dioxide would return to prehuman levels. Domesticated species from cattle to carrots would revert back to their wild ancestors. And on every dehabitated continent, forests and grasslands would reclaim our farms and parking lots as animals began a slow parade back to Eden.

A million years from now, a collection of mysterious artifacts would remain to puzzle whatever alien beings might stumble upon them: the flooded tunnel under the English Channel; bank vaults full of mildewed money; obelisks warning of buried atomic waste (as current law requires) in seven long-obsolete human languages, with pictures. The faces on Mount Rushmore might provoke Ozymandian wonder for about 7.2 million more years. (Lincoln would probably fare better on the pre-1982 penny, cast in durable bronze.) But it’s hard to imagine an alien archaeologist finding poetry in the remote Pacific atolls awash in virtually unbiodegradable plastic bottles, bags and Q-tip shafts, or in the quadrillions of nurdles, microscopic plastic bits in the oceans — they currently outweigh all the plankton by a factor of six — that would continue to cycle uncorrupted through the guts of sea creatures until an enterprising microbe evolved to break them down.

As for the creatures who made this mess, the only residue of our own surprisingly negligible biomass — according to the biologist E. O. Wilson, the six billion-plus humans currently wreaking planetary havoc could all be neatly tucked away in one branch of the Grand Canyon — would be the odd fossil, mingling perhaps with the limbs of Barbie dolls.

Weisman knows from the work of environmental historians that humans have been shaping the natural world since long before the industrial age. His inner Deep Ecologist may dream of Earth saying good riddance to us, but he finds some causes for hope amid the general run of man-bites-planet bad news. At Amboseli National Park in Kenya, he takes comfort in the spectacle of Masai herdsmen living in carefully managed harmony with predators and grazers alike. In the 30-kilometer-radius “Zone of Alienation” around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, where some bridges remain too hot to cross 20 years after the 1986 meltdown, he finds eerie peace in the forests full of moose, lynx and radioactive deer. Watching from inside his protective suit as barn swallows buzz around the reactor, Weisman writes: “You want them to fly away, fast and far. At the same time, it’s mesmerizing that they’re here. It seems so normal, as if apocalypse has turned out to be not so bad after all. The worst happens, and life still goes on.”

So could we ourselves really simply fly away, leaving the rest of nature to slowly clean up our mess? Doomsday rhetoric aside, the fact is that nothing is likely to wipe us out completely, at least not without taking a good chunk of the rest of creation with us. (Even a virus with a 99.99 percent kill rate would still leave more than half a million naturally immune survivors who could fully repopulate the earth to current levels in a mere 50,000 years.) Not that some people aren’t trying to take matters into their own hands. Weisman checks in with Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which advocates gradually putting our species to sleep by collective refusal to procreate. After an initial panic, we would look around and see that the world was actually getting better: “With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we’d be wasting each other’s lives in combat,” Knight says. “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden.” (Apparently he never saw “Children of Men.”)

Weisman has his own flirtation with religious language, his occasionally portentous impassivity giving way to the familiar rhetoric of eco-hellfire as he imagines the earth’s most “narcissistic” species cleansed from the earth as punishment for its “overindulged lifestyle.” But Weisman stops short of calling for our full green burial, arguing instead for a universal “one child per human mother” policy. It would take until 2100 to dwindle to a global population of 1.6 billion, a level last seen in the 19th century, before leaping advances in energy, medicine and food production, but well before then we’d experience “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.” And the evidence, Weisman writes, “wouldn’t hide in statistics. It would be outside every human’s window, where refreshed air would fill each season with more birdsong.”

Even readers who vaguely agree that there are “too many of us” (or is it too many of them?) may not all share Weisman’s brisk certainty that trading a sibling for more birdsong is a good bargain, just as those who applaud the reintroduction of the North American wolf may not quite buy the claim by Dave Foreman, a founder of Earth First!, that filling the New World’s empty über-predator niche with African lions and cheetahs is our best chance to avoid what Weisman calls “the black hole into which we’re shoving the rest of nature.” In the end, it’s the cold facts and cooler heads that drive Weisman’s cautionary message powerfully home. When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, “the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.” Weisman’s gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out.

Matt Gross for The New York Times

Ride board, La Farge, Wis.

NOTHING but sagebrush for 130 miles,” said the construction worker in the orange vest who was temporarily blocking U.S. Highway 20 in eastern Oregon.

As my Volvo idled in the midday heat, I looked past her at the landscape — at the dry, slowly rising hills matted with blue-green-purple tufts of hip-high scrub — then down at my map, and was impressed with her precision: For almost exactly 130 miles to the east, south and west, there was indeed nothing but sagebrush. This really was the desert.

I shut off the engine and crossed my fingers, hoping the car and I would survive.

I almost hadn’t made it this far. Back in Idaho, in 95-degree heat, the car had developed a troubling tendency to seize up with vapor locks, its liquid fuel turning gaseous and unusable, leaving me sweating and frantic at the roadside. I had to wait out one hot afternoon in a bowling alley in Arco, Idaho, near Craters of the Moon National Monument, and another watching “Live Free or Die Hard” in Caldwell, almost in sight of the Oregon border. I got so worked up I started speaking to the car, and even named it — Vivian — as if I could woo it into action.

Having driven roughly 1,000 miles a week for 11 weeks, I should have known better. Like an elderly St. Bernard, this 1989 Volvo 240DL station wagon, bought on Craigslist for $1,600 last May, moved only when — and if — it wanted to.

Still, she had brought me a long way. From New York, I’d driven south, across the increasingly Latino Carolinas, through the gold-rush hills of Georgia and into barbecue-mad and football-frenzied Alabama. Then I’d turned north, stopping in Kentucky bourbon country and living the communal life in rural Wisconsin, then zipping west across Iowa to the Black Hills and Indian reservations of South Dakota.

A sharp left had brought me back down through the great plains to the Vietnamese enclave of Oklahoma City and the weird (and wine-loving) people in Texas Hill Country. From the wild Mexico-New Mexico border, I turned north again, wending my way through the Rockies to the wilderness on the border of Wyoming and Montana.

Now, at last, having visited 26 states and nursed my car through thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs, I was in the home stretch, headed to the final stop, Seattle.

Many things surprised me on this trip, but the fact that I could eat cheap, great food on the road did not. I piled mountains of barbecue into my maw, chowed down on burgers of all sizes and devoured anything with blackberries, and still I spent only $20.98 a day on average. Sure, I could’ve spent even less, but who wants to subsist on Mountain Dew and microwave burritos?

Likewise, sleeping comfortably was rarely a financial burden. Thanks to Couchsurfing.com (where people list free places to stay, in return for the promise that you’ll eventually reciprocate), my camping gear, the occasional friend’s friend’s sister and, yes, the kindness of strangers, I didn’t have to stay in boring chain motels (or scary fleabags) very often, and averaged $31.21 a night for lodging.

This last installment of my journey would take in the deserts of Oregon, a place I was drawn to not only by their reputed beauty and remoteness, but by their place in American road-trip history. This was, in a way, where the fabled tradition began.

In 1903, the automobile was a novelty, expensive and unreliable. With no gas stations and few paved roads outside of major cities, horses and railroads offered more reliable transport than a creaky chassis powered by a breakdown-prone internal combustion engine.

Which is probably why Horatio Nelson Jackson, a 31-year-old doctor, bet friends at the University Club of San Francisco that he could drive a car from coast to coast. They scoffed. A few days later, Jackson was at the helm of a $3,000, two-cylinder Winton automobile, accompanied by Sewall K. Crocker, a mechanic and chauffeur, heading east.

To skirt the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of Nevada, they first drove north. But up in Oregon, they hit the sagebrush, and the Winton suffered. They lost all their gasoline because of a leak, had to drag the car through streambeds and once wound up being towed by a horse.

Still, somehow, they made it from Lakeview, along the southern Oregon border, through the desert to Burns and finally to Ontario, on the Idaho border. From there, despite having almost every part of the car fail at one point or another, they shot straight east to New York on what would eventually, more or less, become Interstate 80, winning the $50 bet and immortality. (The journey was chronicled in the Ken Burns documentary “Horatio’s Drive,” and its accompanying book, written by Mr. Burns and Dayton Duncan.)

If they, driving a 1903 Winton, could cross the desert, so could Vivian and I. And, as the day began to cool in Caldwell, I steered west in hope of tracing Jackson’s route in reverse.

In Oregon, my first stop was Ontario, where Jackson and Crocker had picked up tires and other supplies from the short-line railroad depot. The current depot, built three years later, is a lovely Queen Anne-style building that was in excellent repair when I arrived. (It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.) After snapping a few photos, I moved on to Ontario’s main attraction that weekend, the Malheur County Fair (admission $5).

Immediately, I noticed something odd. Though this county fair had everything you’d expect — a Ferris wheel, a country-music band, preserved-fruit competitions and livestock displays (“Lot of good steers here,” said one observer) — I spotted little details that surprised me, like the Asian-inspired “Happy Bowls” sold by the Idaho-Oregon Buddhist Temple Sunday School Women’s Association.

And although the teenagers roaming in packs dressed like American high-schoolers everywhere (i.e., head-to-toe Abercrombie & Fitch), I was struck that they came from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds — black, white, Asian, Latino, Indian. Back in New York City, this would have been routine, but for three months I’d been passing through towns and cities still subtly divided by race, and I’d almost forgotten there were places where different peoples not only coexisted but became friends.

Even 130 miles west, in the crossroads town of Burns, Ore., where I arrived just before midnight, I saw signs of cosmopolitanism: a bookstore-espresso bar, a Thai restaurant seamlessly integrated into the aging Elkhorn Club, a thriving 1930s-era movie theater. (Sadly, the budget hotel options were less urbane: I spent a night in a $60-a-night Days Inn, the next amid the garish 1970s décor of the City Center Motel, $45.)

Still, it didn’t seem a bad place to spend a couple of days, I thought. Horatio Nelson Jackson must have had it rougher. Back in 1903, the town was a mere 14 years old, and was just about as far as a town could be from a railroad station. Little wonder, then, that the arrival of Jackson’s Winton was a newsworthy event.

“A real live automobile caused considerable stir on our streets last Monday afternoon,” read the report in The Burns Times-Herald, which I dug out of the paper’s archives with the help of Randy Parks, a sports reporter. “This was the first automobile to visit Harney County and many old men had never seen one.”

In the Western History Room of the public library (80 West D Street, 541-573-6670, www.harneycountylibrary.org), I found more evidence of Jackson’s sojourn in Burns. A file there contained a number of other regional newspaper reports — “the machine broke down before it got out of town,” The Lake County Examiner reported — and, even better, a grainy photo of the Winton.

I also discovered that just two years later, in 1905, another pair of automobile drivers passed through Burns, on a race from New York to Portland, Ore., and declared that “Harney County has the best roads we have found in over 1,000 miles.” From rough desert to smooth tracks in just 24 months; the automotive century had truly begun, right there in Burns.

Today, the roads are still great, leading smoothly out into sagebrush country in all directions, and after my historical research and a $14.95 rib-eye lunch at Ye Olde Castle (186 West Monroe Street, 541-573-6601), I fired up Vivian and followed them south.

The desert, as the band America should have sung, is an ocean with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above, and as I cruised across the smooth asphalt strips, I got a sense of the fertile ecosystem and geology lurking amid the sagebrush. Low mountain ridges sprang up from nowhere, as if pulled from a bedsheet of dry earth, and from their tops, I could gaze down on low-altitude zones of green, damp marshland. Amid the silence of the desert, flocks of waterfowl and shorebirds — wigeons, dunlins, sandpipers — would flap their wings with a squawk and take off from shallow ponds.

I drove and drove, marveling at the feat of Jackson and Crocker. In my highly refined testament to Swedish engineering, I had traveled nearly 12,000 miles — thanks to America’s excellent road system, its talented mechanics and the indispensable guidance of you, my readers — but it had never been easy. Jackson, however, had had none of that, not even roads or maps, and yet he managed 30 miles per hour through this foreboding land. In comparison, my summer excursion paled.

But still I drove, stopping to visit the Peter French Round Barn (www.roundbarn.net) in Harney County, an elegant 19th-century wooden structure, 100 feet in diameter, where ranchers used to break horses in the winter.

And 40 or 50 miles down a gravel road (and just over 100 miles southeast of Burns), I came upon Alvord Hot Springs, a concrete tub of warm, slightly mossy-feeling water where I soaked for 30 minutes, indulging in a free luxury that had eluded me in Colorado (where a broken transmission sabotaged my plans to visit every spring in the Rocky Mountains).

Finally, a few minutes farther down the gravel road, I rounded a bend and arrived at the Alvord Desert, with sand as fine and white as any you’d find on any tropical beach. I walked out there and stared at the vastness, at the russet mountains blackening at nightfall, and thought of Luke Skywalker, who gazed at the twin setting suns of Tatooine and imagined himself leaving home for great adventure.

Me, I knew that my journey would be ending quite soon. The next day I would cross the Cascade Mountains, head up the coast toward Seattle, sell Vivian on Craigslist and fly home to Brooklyn — and to my beautiful, patient wife, Jean. But after this unlikely desert, I might never again feel as remote from the world, as far from the everyday bustle of American life, its pressures and responsibilities.

Had Jackson felt this, too? Had he not wanted the journey — with all its frustrations and epiphanies — ever to end, despite the enticements of home?

I considered pitching my tent right there, but I had no food, and, in any case, I needed to make progress toward the coast if I wanted the next day’s drive to be manageable. So, night having fallen, I put Vivian into gear and drove down the gravel road, rabbits scampering across my path, a dusty rain falling, lightning cracking horizontal in the distance, and tried to relish the last 100 miles before bedtime. It went by in a blink.

Susana Raab for The New York Times

At Rustico, the challenge is to match the right dishes with the right beers and ales from the restaurant’s selection of 310.

ALEXANDRIA, VA., is only 10 minutes by car from downtown Washington, but the two restaurant scenes once felt decades apart. On one side of the Potomac River, you had nouvelle American bistros and fancy steakhouses packed with Washington insiders and their hefty expense accounts. On the other, there were Applebee's and stodgy French dining rooms seemingly preserved in amber.

But the past is catching up. In recent years, young chefs and ambitious restaurateurs from Washington have crossed the Potomac and planted their knives in the Old Town section, where the Federal-style row houses date to when George Washington rode up from nearby Mount Vernon to talk of cutting ties with Britain. Drawn by the area's new professional class, lower rents and a blank culinary canvas, fashionable new spots are serving dishes like oysters with beer jellies and sourdough flan with fresh sardines — offerings that were unthinkable not long ago.

Among the first to dip his culinary toes across the Potomac was Cathal Armstrong. The former chef at Bistro Bis, a Capitol Hill favorite among the powerbroker set, he left in 2004 to open Restaurant Eve (110 South Pitt Street, 703-706-0450, www.restauranteve.com), a casually elegant, sunlit bistro on a red-brick paved street in the heart of Old Town. “People said we were crazy,” Mr. Amstrong said, in his light Irish brogue. “The sentiment was ‘we're not going to cross the moat.' ”

The foodies, it turned out, were already there. Former rail yards were being developed for town houses and attracting people who knew the difference between gnocchi and gnudi. On any given night, Eve's dining rooms are packed with young commuter couples and members of the local horse-country set, who tuck into French-style dishes like pork belly confit with fava beans and oregano ($28), and stuffed rabbit with chanterelles and garden peas ($31).

As word spread, Mr. Armstrong responded by opening more restaurants: Eamonn's A Dublin Chipper (728 King Street, 703-299-8384; www.eamonnsdublinchipper.com), a fish-and-chips place with a popular cocktail bar, PX; and the Majestic (911 King Street, 703-837-9117; www.majesticcafe.com), a 1932 diner that now serves comfort dishes like fried green tomatoes — locally grown, of course — and seafood risotto with squid, shrimp, mussels and salmon ($14.50).

Other chefs soon followed and turned King Street, the main street in Old Town, into a gas-lamp restaurant row. Some were drawn to Alexandria's more intimate dining rooms, where fewer seats and a bigger kitchen are the norm.

Anthony Chittum left Notti Bianche, a bustling Italian restaurant in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, to take the helm at Vermilion (1120 King Street, 703-684-9669; www.vermilionrestaurant.com). In an old town house with exposed brick walls and flickering gas lamps that mimic those on the sidewalks, Vermilion has a relaxed, unpretentious vibe. The menu features new American cuisine like corn chowder with jalapeños and fried Nomini Creek oysters ($9) and sautéed diver scallops with pesto and pickled red onions ($16).

The small-town pace also allows chefs to spread their creative wings. “I could do exactly what I want,” said Morou Ouattara, an “Iron Chef” contestant who ran the kitchen at Signatures, a lavish restaurant in the Penn Quarter section of Washington that was owned by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

After Signatures closed, instead of working for another Washington restaurateur, Mr. Ouattara opened his own establishment in Old Town. Farrah Olivia (600 Franklin Street, 703-778-2233; www.farraholiviarestaurant.com) is decorated in chocolate browns and giraffe-like patterns that recall the owner's Ivory Coast upbringing. It serves American cuisine with French, African and Japanese touches and molecular gastronomy techniques. Dishes include escolar (a mackerel-like fish) that is pan-seared then shocked in an ice-cold marinade and served with pickled watermelon rind ($12). Anise-flavored gnudi (poached ravioli stuffing without the pasta) is topped with a Parmesan foam ($18).

Among the newest arrivals is Frank Morales, the former chef at Zola, the power restaurant in Penn Quarter where he garnered rave reviews. Attracted by Old Town's up-and-coming restaurant scene, Mr. Morales jumped ship early this year and joined Rustico (827 Slaters Lane, 703-224-5051; www.rusticorestaurant.com), an upscale pub that serves modern American cuisine and 310 varieties of beer and ale.

In addition to novelty creations like hop brittle and beer salt, Mr. Morales offers “trios” that include three dishes with a flight of beer, priced separately. The $17 duck trio, for example, matches a foie gras spring roll with a Belgian lambic beer, St. Louis Framboise, and a moist duck confit with Gouden Carolus Grand Cru, a Belgian ale brewed to commemorate the birthday of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Feb. 24).

Hotels have joined in Alexandria's culinary ascent. Kimpton Hotels, for example, is turning a former Holiday Inn on King Street into Hotel Monaco. Set to open this fall, the hotel's restaurant, Jackson 20, will be run by the Houston chef Jeff Armstrong, known for his modern Southern cuisine.

Other high-end restaurants are on their way. This month, Jamie Leeds, who owns the ever-crowded Hank's Oyster Bar in Washington, will bring her popular lobster rolls and raw seafood bar to Old Town (1026 King Street, www.hanksrestaurants.com). Cathal Armstrong is looking to open a bakery and charcuterie.

And Mr. Ouattara, who named his first restaurant after his daughter, has another daughter, Kora. “She's only 16 months old, but I have to do something,” he said. “I have to open another restaurant for her.”

Stefano Buonamici for The New York Times

At Fundació Joan Miró, a show of works by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

IT was a cool spring day at the foot of La Rambla, Barcelona's famous — and famously overrun — main promenade. I had been strolling under the freshly leafed plane trees, but now the sky threatened rain, and the crowds were growing wearisome. It was the perfect time to duck into the darkness of the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica. Inside the museum, a former convent, the bustle of the city falls away.

On the dim, vaulted main floor I found seven large screens that divided the space irregularly. Upon each was projected the video image of a luminous white wall and a barred doorway, through which I glimpsed a walkway and summer foliage.

Entitled “Lugar de Silencios,” the piece was a collaboration between the Barcelona artist Montserrat Soto and the poet Dionisio Cañas. Portly in a sweater and long gray hair — a portrait of the artist of a certain age — Mr. Cañas appeared in the video doorways from time to time, deep in thought amid crunching footfalls. Breaking the silence, he proffered snippets of poetry: “No time, no time, no time./No time for coffee,/no time for donuts,/no time for The New York Times.”

Barcelona can be overwhelming for visitors, and the stillness was a welcome break from a forced march of medieval alleyways, tapas and must-see attractions. But as my wife, Nina, and I discovered, Barcelona's art scene, in its breadth, its internationalism and above all its depth, is hardly a respite.

For the visitor, art in Barcelona mirrors the city's charming jumble. “It's a place you can walk, a city for flaneurs,” said Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, called Macba. “You can lose yourself here.” Indeed, when we visited, the museum featured installations by the Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The cluttered, moody environments evoke the rooms of the mind, where memory and nostalgia give way to darker dreams.

Installations like “The Dark Pool,” a chaotic stage set shot through with snippets of sound triggered by visitors' motion, reminded me of an old bar in the surrounding El Raval neighborhood — the kind of place where dark casks of vermouth line the walls, and the air is blue with cigarette smoke and sharp with salty fish. My favorite, which I'm sure I'll never find again: a timeless joint named Montse's, vanished down a narrow street on an exploration measured in wine and olives.

Places like that, where vermouth seeps out of ancient tarnished pipes, are not the reason most come to Barcelona. But if you stumble into them, they're what you remember most vividly.

It's the same with art. Over everything loom the giants: Picasso, Dalí and Miró. Each spent formative years in and around Barcelona, and each has a museum dedicated to his work in the city. Of them the Fundació Joan Miró is the most striking. Not only is its location magnificent — it is set on the leafy slope of Montjuïc, overlooking Barcelona's jumble — but the collection is a comprehensive and definitive look at the artist's work. The airy space is filled with the echoes of laughing students, a rambunctiousness invited by the tense motion in Miró's canvases. (When we visited, the Fundació also featured a show of the bold, bent forms created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which seemed an ideal pairing with Miró's work.)

The Picasso-Dalí-Miró trinity connects 20th-century Spanish art with its historical antecedents. The Museu Picasso is particularly good at demonstrating this: on 58 canvases, Picasso reinterprets Velázquez' 1656 “Meninas,” enlivening it with cameos by his dachshund, Lump, and evoking, around Canvas 23, the sinking my-5-year-old-could-do-that philistinism Picasso is famous for.

But it is telling that Picasso's and Dalí's best work is not here. The bulk of their careers were spent elsewhere, and their masterpieces reside in places like Madrid, Paris and New York. “In those cities,” Mr. Borja-Villel said, “art is displayed in a colonial way. But there is no sense of empire here. Barcelona is a capital with no country. It has nationalistic pride but no trophies.”

Free from the ponderous shadows of iconic masterpieces, Barcelona's art scene is broad and eclectic. “It's a rich cultural space, but fractured,” said Josep Ramoneda, the founding director of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The center opened its doors in 1994 to provide a focal point for creative energy in the city. “There were many groups doing things here,” Mr. Ramoneda said, “but they weren't connected.”

During the Franco government, expression was tightly controlled. Spanish art had skipped a generation by the time democracy was restored in 1978. “Modernity did not exist here,” Mr. Borja-Villel said. “We went from Franco straight to postmodernism.”

The Macba building is an impressive space that combines well-thought-out exhibition halls with airy public spaces. It is fronted by a courtyard that resembles a skate park: university students gather there amid the clatter of plywood decks and bustling outdoor cafés.

This is quite a change for a neighborhood once synonymous with port city seediness. “Twenty years ago,” Mr. Borja-Villel said, “you could not come here with a clean shirt.” Barcelona's revitalization was initiated with the 1992 Olympic Games. The early stages of its makeover, chronicled in dreamlike black-and-white by the photographer Manolo Laguillo and on display at Macba when we visited, bring to mind contemporary Beijing.

Art itself has played a key role in Barcelona's renaissance. Since the Olympics, 11 major art institutions have opened in the city. The complex in El Raval that includes Macba and Centre de Cultura Contemporània, two universities and a forthcoming library of contemporary art, was conceived as a “curatorial area” that would spur the transformation of the neighborhood.

By all accounts it is working: the area is lively, and the urban ecology that moves inexorably from artists to real estate developers to trendy professionals seems in full swing. Bookstores, boutiques featuring local designers, restaurants, small galleries and workshops, and the icily hip Casa Camper Hotel surround the museums.

But if art has changed the city, the new face of the city is also changing art. Last year Barcelona's government spent 96 million euros on the arts, confirming institutions like Macba, which opened in 1995, as major centers of cultural gravity. But institutionalization raises new questions about the role of art in the city's life.

“It is an equilibrium,” Mr. Ramoneda said. “The government pays for a play that is critical of it, but I get no political interference: there is a tradition of respect from those who fund art.”

Perhaps as a result, Barcelona lacks a robust private art market. About a dozen private galleries line a few tony blocks of Carrer Consell de Cent, just around the corner from Antonio Gaudí's Casa Batlló on Passeig de Gràcia. The handful of galleries manage a reasonable range of styles, mostly from established Spanish artists like Andrés Rábago, who as El Roto is a well-known political cartoonist. We saw his cleanly executed, nearly decorative portraits of Spanish workingmen at the Galería Jordi Barnadas. But for the most part these galleries lack life.

Until recently, the most lively arts scene in Barcelona was in the streets. But earlier this year, the city painted over most of the vibrant graffiti and stencils that had made Barcelona a requisite stop on the worldwide street art circuit, suggesting to some that institutionalized art in Barcelona is eating its young. (Cryptic black-and-white “BNE” stickers are still plastered around the city: “Kilroy Was Here” for the post-globalized artsy hipster set.)

“Artists here are the lost souls who ended up on these shores and want to express something,” said Rigo Pex, a freelance curator and musician who is also on the staff of le cool, an online events magazine based in Barcelona. With its night life, cheap food and drink and formerly cheap rent, the city has been a magnet for young people in the past decade. It became a meeting ground for artists from around Europe and the Americas — a ferment played out on the city's walls, and among ambitious arts collectives of every stripe. “Locals are easygoing,” said Mr. Pex, who is from Guatemala. “It's the visitors who have all the energy.”

But while the arts institutions have played a part in developing this scene, it is entering a new phase. As rents get higher, is development doing away with the very conditions that inspired Picasso's “Demoiselles D'Avignon”?

In a city more than 2,000 years old, how could it not be so? La Rambla was a riverbed. El Raval was a red-light district. Santa Mònica was a convent. Now it is an art space. One day it will be something else. “Es lo que hay,” said Mr. Pex, repeating a refrain of resignation: It is what it is.

Instead, up-and-coming art in Barcelona is gravitating into a shifting milieu of scrappy galleries. Almost all of them have other sources of revenue — clothes, a cafe, books. And many of the artists also do commercial work, a concession that would be familiar to Picasso, who drew menus for Els Quatre Gats at Carrer Montsió 3, where, at age 17, he had his first exposition.

Hole-in-the-wall gallery cafes like Miscelänea continue that tradition, but with Wi-Fi. If the big institutions like Macba and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona thrive in part because of their formal connections to other institutions around the world, these leaner outfits are able to do the same via MySpace and Flickr.

When I visited, the two-person Barcelona collective BTOY was playing host to ByLOA, a show of international street art at its most lyrical and polished. More visible galleries like Iguapop and Dudua in El Borne provide outlets for both street-inflected art and more readily consumed spinoffs like books and jewelry. Iguapop, for example, is a long, white space in which gallery walls crowded with international up-and-comers like Mike Giant, Aiko and Miss Van stare down a retail side selling streetwear from Stüssy and Adidas.

Taken together, Barcelona is an ideal place to dip into many simultaneous currents of artistic expression. The juxtaposition makes it possible to see the connection between, say, Dalí and the Berlin transplant Boris Hoppek's droll “Bimbosculptures” at Iguapop, or Picasso's canvases and BTOY's stencil constructions. In Barcelona, they are brought together by an introspective rather than monumental quality.

“The purpose of art,” Mr. Borja- Villel said, “is to understand the world in which you live better. It's not about spectacle, but about understanding.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

The best openings and current shows are listed in le cool, an online guide at www.lecool.com/current.html. The company also publishes an alluring clothbound guidebook to the city, “le cool changed my life.”

At street level, the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (La Rambla 7; 34-93-316-2810; www.centredartsantamonica.net; free admission) houses an information center on the city's arts scene. Be sure to pick up the latest ART Barcelona guide (www.artbarcelona.es).

Articket BCN includes entry to seven major exhibit spaces, including Macba, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Fundació Joan Miró and the Museu Picasso for 20 euros, or about $27 at $1.38 to the euro. Available at participating museums or (34-93) 326-2948; www.articketbcn.org.

A guide to private galleries throughout Catalonia can be found at www.galeriescatalunya.com.

SEEING ART

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Montalegre 5; 34-93-306-4100; www.cccb.org; entry 6 euros)

Fundació Joan Miró (Parc de Montjuïc; 34-93-329-1908; www.fjmiro.cat; entry 7.50 euros)

Fundació Suñol (Passeig de Gràcia 98; 34-93-496-1032; www.fundaciosunol.org) is a private collection of modern art newly open to the public; entry 4 euros.

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Plaça des Àngels 1; 34-93-412-0810; www.macba.es; entry 7.50 euros.)

Museu Picasso (Montcada 15-23; 34-93-319-6310; www.museupicasso.bcn.es; entry 6 euros) has a collection of more than 3,000 works by the artist. The line to enter snakes down a narrow street in the Barri Gòtic.

BUYING ART

Dudua is a gallery and shop at Rossic 6 (34-93-315-0401; www.duduadudua.blogspot.com) that specializes in crafty artwork. It is the place to pick up a crocheted hot dog.

Galeria Jordi Barnadas (Consell de Cent 347; 34-93-215-63-65; www.barnadas.com) is part of the stretch of galleries along Consell de Cent.

Iguapop Gallery (Comerç 15; 34-93-310-0735; www.iguapop.net) plays host to shows by up-and-coming practitioners of international street style, and sells clothing and art books.

Miscelänea (Guardia 10; 34-93-317-9398; www.miscelanea.info) is a loungy cafe and gallery in El Raval.

MAKING ART

Artists Love Barcelona (www.artistslovebarcelona.com) is a small gallery near Macba that also runs workshops and art-intensive weeks for visitors. Five-day “painting holidays” start at 890 euros, and include accommodations and some meals.