Georges-Eugène Haussmann had just spiced up Paris with his famous boulevards, and Amsterdam wanted in on the action.
Over the next few days, I crawled all over the city, walking the boulevards, climbing steep streets and staring out at the sea from the heights.
No boulevards, no villas and no train station, but long, narrow roads full of cheap and often inferior housing.
It is a collection of monuments and boulevards on a scale that screams "L'état, c'est moi".
The "republican march" filled the capital's boulevards with children in pushchairs, students, pensioners, Catholics and Muslims.
He recently went to Nairobi, the capital of neighbouring Kenya, to see an exhibition called "Mogadishu Then and Now", featuring vintage photographs of the city's boulevards, mosques and cathedral before the fighting.
Its canny businessmen have prospered on cross-border trade, and the city is pleasant and tidy with parks and boulevards that are the envy of the rest of Afghanistan.
As many as 10,000 people showed up for a 2.5-km wander through Moscow's boulevards.
They then walked around Moscow's parks and boulevards until dawn.
THIS week, for the first time in Congo's one-month civil war, the smell of gunsmoke drifted through Kinshasa's boulevards.
Fifty of the pictures that resulted have just gone on show at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London.Founded in the 8th century BC as a Greek colony named after the siren Parthenope, Naples is a place of contradictions grimy backstreets join stylish boulevards, crumbling buildings conceal elegant ballrooms.
