A long weekend in Vilnius

Today you arrive. Your driver meets you at Vilnius airport (VNO) and takes you the fifteen minutes into the Old Town, to your hotel on Gaono Street.

In the afternoon your guide meets you at the hotel. You start on Cathedral Square, with the white cathedral and its separate bell tower, then walk into the courtyards of Vilnius University, founded in 1579, one quiet arcade opening into the next. From there it is a few minutes to St Anne's, the red gothic church that Napoleon is supposed to have wanted to carry back to Paris in his hand, and the much larger Bernardine church behind it. The walk ends at the Gate of Dawn, the only one of the old city gates still standing, where a silver-covered icon of the Virgin hangs in a chapel above the arch.

Your guide walks you back to the hotel. Dinner is your own, from our shortlist of Old Town tables.

Today your guide meets you at the hotel after breakfast and walks you over the little bridge on the Vilnia into Užupis, the artists' quarter that declared itself a republic in 1997. Its constitution hangs on a wall on Paupio Street in a few dozen languages, and the first article is worth reading twice.

In the late morning your driver collects you both for Trakai, 28 km west of the city, about half an hour by car. The castle stands on its own island in Lake Galvė, red brick, rebuilt from ruins in the last century, and you cross to it on a wooden footbridge. Your guide takes you through the courtyards and the museum rooms of what was a seat of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania.

Lunch is on Karaimų Street, where the little wooden houses of the Karaim, who came here from Crimea in the late fourteenth century, still turn three windows to the road. What you eat is kibinai, a hot filled pastry. Your driver brings you back to Vilnius by mid-afternoon and the rest of the day is quiet. In the evening you walk to dinner at a table booked for you in the Old Town, then back to the hotel.

Today is a slow morning before you fly. Your guide meets you at the hotel after breakfast and starts on Literatų Street, a short lane with more than two hundred small plaques on one wall, each made by an artist for a writer tied to the city or to Lithuania.

From there you walk back through the streets around your hotel, Žydų, Gaono and Stiklių, the heart of the city once called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Your guide shows you the site of the Great Synagogue, which no longer stands, and the monument to the Vilna Gaon, the eighteenth-century scholar the street is named for.

The walk ends at Halės market, the covered hall that has stood on Pylimo Street since 1906, with time for a coffee and something to take home. Your guide walks you back to the hotel, and from midday your driver takes you to Vilnius airport (VNO).