Von Rothko nach Rundāle

The first evening is deliberately unstructured. The Old Town walk is short, an hour at most, enough to orient you between the cathedral and the river. Dinner is where the trip actually starts: our art historian sets out what you are going to see, why a Latvian border town holds six Rothkos, and how an Italian who built the Winter Palace came to leave a baroque palace in a Latvian beet field.

Daugavpils is the second city and almost nobody visits it, which is most of its charm. It was Dvinsk under the Russian empire and Dyneburg before that, and the layers show. The afternoon walk takes in the Unity House, the ornate brick of the merchant quarter, and the riverbank, where the city simply stops and the Daugava keeps going into Belarus.

The six paintings on permanent loan are hung in a dedicated low-lit room, and the curator will let you sit with them as long as you want, which is the only sensible way to look at a Rothko. The rest of the centre rotates loans and shows contemporary Latvian work. In the afternoon the fortress itself takes over: a complete imperial fortification begun in 1810, still partly inhabited, its ramparts walkable end to end.

Aglona is a white twin-towered basilica in the middle of very little, and on August 15 it draws 100,000 pilgrims. On an ordinary weekday it is nearly empty and all the better for it. The Old Believers came here in the seventeenth century fleeing the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, and they have kept their liturgy, their calendar and their beards ever since. Lunch is at a family table: lake fish, rye bread, cucumbers, and kvass.