Dijon, France

DIJON owes its origins to its strategic position in Celtic times on the tin merchants' route from Britain up the Seine and across the Alps to the Adriatic. Its golden age was the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when a sucession of dukes used their tremendous wealth and power – especially their control of Flanders, the dominant manufacturing region – to make Dijon one of the greatest centres of art, learning and science in Europe. It has remained a pre-eminent provincial city, especially since the rail and industrial booms of the mid-nineteenth century. Today, it's an affluent university town: smart, modern and young.