The Grand European Circuit: London, Paris & Berlin

Breakfast starts at The Wolseley, the grand art deco brasserie in the heart of Mayfair, with the neighborhood’s luxury boutiques right on your doorstep to browse afterward.

The afternoon brings a tour of the Tower of London, followed by a trip to the Southbank for a further look at the city’s history at Shakespeare’s Globe. If you’re a theater fan, join the “groundlings” and watch the play standing in the yard the way Elizabethan audiences did, though seats are available if you’d rather sit.

As evening falls, take a walk along the Southbank with the Thames beside you, then head back into Mayfair for dinner at Sexy Fish, all gold leaf, Damien Hirst sculptures, and a see-and-be-seen crowd that closes out the day exactly right.

Your last day in London starts in Kensington, with a visit to the V&A before a stroll through the colorful streets of Notting Hill. From there, it’s on to the Natural History Museum for a final dose of culture, then back to your hotel to check out and begin the journey to Paris.

The Eurostar gets you into the French capital in under two and a half hours. Once you’ve checked into your hotel in the center of the city, settle in with dinner at a classic Parisian brasserie to mark the start of the next leg of the trip.

This morning takes you to Place de la Concorde, right at the heart of the city, with the Louvre on one side and the Champs-Élysées on the other. Spend the morning inside the Louvre taking in some of its great masterworks, then walk the length of the Champs-Élysées afterward.

From there, head to Saint-Germain-des-Prés for an afternoon of brasserie hopping through one of Paris’s most storied neighborhoods.

Today is Le Marais, one of Paris’s oldest and most layered neighborhoods, home to the city’s historic Jewish quarter along Rue des Rosiers and, since the 1980s, its leading gay district, centered on Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie and Rue Vieille-du-Temple. The area’s narrow medieval streets survived Haussmann’s renovation of Paris almost untouched, so you’re walking past seventeenth-century hôtels particuliers, aristocratic townhouses, now housing museums, galleries, and boutiques, one of which holds the Picasso Museum. Spend the morning wandering, ducking into whichever shop or café catches your eye along the way.

From there, walk to Notre Dame to see the cathedral, then over to the Centre Pompidou, still striking for its inside-out, pipes-on-the-outside design decades after it opened. Round out the day with dinner at Grand Coeur.

Today takes you up to Montmartre, still Paris’s highest point and once a village of its own before the city grew to swallow it. Sacré-Cœur crowns the hill with views across the whole of Paris, and the Moulin Rouge sits at its foot, as much a symbol of the neighborhood’s bohemian, cabaret-era past as an attraction in its own right. It draws crowds, but the view alone justifies the climb.

For something different, spend part of the afternoon at Père Lachaise, Paris’s grandest cemetery, home to Oscar Wilde’s grave, a striking Jacob Epstein monument now protected behind glass after decades of lipstick kisses from visitors paying tribute.

Later, make your way to Shakespeare and Company, the legendary bookshop on the Left Bank that once counted Hemingway and Joyce among its regulars, before wandering into the Latin Quarter for a final look at the city.

Fly to Berlin in the evening.

After a slow start to the morning, head to the DDR Museum for a hands-on look at daily life behind the Iron Curtain, then walk along the surviving stretches of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 to 1989. From there, Checkpoint Charlie marks the most famous crossing point between East and West Berlin, now as much a piece of Cold War history as a photo stop.

In the evening, dinner at one of Berlin’s top restaurants rounds out the day.

Morning brings a visit to KaDeWe, Germany’s largest department store and the second largest in Europe after Harrods, before the tone shifts entirely at the Holocaust Memorial, a quiet, deliberately disorienting monument to the darkest chapter of the country’s history.

Berlin carries its past everywhere, but the city that exists today is prosperous, dynamic, and unmistakably forward-looking, even as it holds onto the weight of what came before. Kreuzberg, in the former West, remains the city’s most consistently cool neighborhood, while Friedrichshain, just across the former border in the East, has its own distinct bohemian energy. Stand on that line today and there’s little to mark where the Wall once stood, only proof of how fast this city can reinvent itself.

If nightlife is the goal, Berlin delivers. It’s home to one of the most storied and ambitious club scenes anywhere in the world, and remains one of Europe’s most significant LGBTQ+ capitals into the night.

On your last day you’re free to explore the city at your own pace before your return flight.