Best of Poland

Your chauffeur meets you at Warsaw airport (WAW) and drives you to the Hotel Bristol, the grande dame of the Royal Route, a short walk from the Presidential Palace. After you have settled in, your historian walks you into the old town. What you are looking at is a reconstruction: ninety percent of Warsaw was flattened by 1945, and the old town you are standing in was rebuilt through the 1950s using Bernardo Bellotto's eighteenth-century cityscapes as working drawings, down to the window mouldings. Your guide shows you where the seams are, which buildings are genuinely old, and what was decided to leave out. The walk ends in the Market Square, and dinner is in a cellar restaurant a few streets off it.

The morning goes to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which tells the story of the sixty-three days in 1944 when the city rose, was not relieved, and was then systematically destroyed as a reprisal. Your historian walks it with you, because the museum is dense and rewards someone who can tell you what to look at. In the afternoon you cross to the Royal Łazienki, the park the last Polish king built himself, with a palace standing on an island in its own lake and peacocks that have the run of the place. In the evening a pianist plays for you privately, an hour of Chopin in a salon rather than a concert hall, which is roughly how this music was written to be heard.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you south to Kraków, about three and a half hours with a stop, and you check into the Hotel Copernicus on Kanonicza street, the oldest house on the oldest street below Wawel Hill. In the late afternoon your guide takes you out into the Main Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe and still the working centre of the city rather than a museum of itself. You hear the hejnał, the trumpet call from the tower of St Mary's that breaks off mid-note every hour, and your guide explains why. Kraków was never bombed flat, so unlike Warsaw everything here is genuinely as old as it looks. Dinner is under the vaults of a fourteenth-century cellar off the square.

You start on Wawel Hill, a short walk from the hotel door, with a private visit to the royal castle and cathedral before the general opening. This was the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years and the place they were crowned and buried, and going through it early with a historian rather than in a queue is the difference between a monument and a story. In the afternoon you walk to the Czartoryski Museum to stand in front of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, one of only a handful of surviving Leonardo paintings and, unusually, one you can generally see without a crowd in front of it. The rest of the day is unstructured, which in Kraków is not a waste: the square rewards sitting in it.

The morning belongs to Kazimierz, the quarter that was a separate town for four hundred years and held one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe until 1941. Your specialist walks you through its seven surviving synagogues, the old cemetery, and the courtyards that most visitors pass without noticing, and is straightforward about what happened here and what the quarter has become since. In the afternoon the tone changes deliberately: a city chef takes you into a working kitchen for a couple of hours of making pierogi by hand, which is harder than it looks, alongside a tasting of Polish vodkas that are meant to be drunk cold and neat rather than mixed. You eat what you made.

Twenty minutes outside Kraków you descend into Wieliczka, a salt mine worked continuously from the thirteenth century until the 1990s. What the miners left behind is the point: chamber after chamber carved out of rock salt, and at a hundred and one metres down the Chapel of St Kinga, a full-sized church with altarpieces, reliefs and chandeliers all cut from salt by miners in their own time. You have it privately, and a table is set there for you. Afterwards your chauffeur drives you west to Wrocław, roughly three hours, and you arrive in time to see the market square lights come on around the old town hall.

Wrocław was German Breslau until 1945, then repopulated almost entirely by Poles displaced from what is now Ukraine, and the city carries both histories at once. Your guide starts in the Rynek, the second-largest market square in the country after Kraków's, then takes you over to Ostrów Tumski, the cathedral island, where the gas lamps are still lit by hand every evening. In the afternoon you visit the Centennial Hall, Max Berg's 1913 reinforced-concrete dome that was an engineering scandal at the time and is UNESCO-listed now. Threaded through the whole day is the dwarf hunt: several hundred small bronze figures set into pavements, doorways and drainpipes across the city, which began as a protest symbol against the communist authorities and became the thing children now drag their parents around to find.

This is the longest driving day, and it is broken deliberately. Halfway north you stop in Toruń, a red-brick gothic town on the Vistula that came through the war intact and is where Copernicus was born; you have time for the old town, the leaning tower, and the gingerbread, which has been made here to guarded recipes since the fourteenth century and is nothing like the soft version sold elsewhere. In the late afternoon you carry on to the coast and check into a design hotel on Granary Island in Gdańsk, with the old crane and the merchant facades of the Motława waterfront directly across the water.

Gdańsk is the least Polish-looking city in Poland: a Hanseatic merchant port whose gabled facades were rebuilt after 1945 from paintings and photographs, in a style that is closer to Amsterdam than to Kraków. Your guide walks you the Long Market, up St Mary's for the view if you want it, and along the Motława to the medieval crane. Mid-morning you sit down with a working amber master, because the Baltic coast has traded this stuff for two thousand years and the difference between good amber and the rest is worth having explained by someone who cuts it. The afternoon goes to the European Solidarity Centre and the shipyard gate, where a strike in 1980 began the sequence that ended communism in Europe, told by a guide who remembers it.

An hour east of Gdańsk stands Malbork, the fortress the Teutonic Knights built as their capital and the largest brick castle in the world by surface area, big enough that the scale does not register in photographs. You go late in the day on purpose. The day-trip coaches leave in the afternoon, and the castle then runs a lantern route through the courtyards, the chapter house and the Grand Master's palace with the crowds gone and the brick going orange in the low light. Your guide takes you through the order's rise and its abrupt end, which is a stranger story than the building suggests. You are back on the waterfront in Gdańsk for a late dinner.

A short drive up the coast brings you to Sopot, the seaside resort the three cities share, for a last slow morning. The wooden pier runs more than five hundred metres into the Baltic, which makes it the longest in Europe, and walking to the end of it is the correct way to finish a trip that started in a rebuilt inland capital. Depending on your flight there is usually time for coffee on Monte Cassino street before your chauffeur takes you the twenty minutes to Gdańsk airport (GDN) and sees you to the terminal.