These are walking routes built for a single free day in a city, ordered so that each one finishes near a metro stop and near somewhere to eat. None of them require a ticket booked in advance, and each has been walked end to end on the dates written at the top of the page rather than assembled from a map.
How a walk is put together
A route starts from the arrival point rather than from the landmark, which is the difference between a walk you can begin at eight in the morning and a list of sights in geographic order. Every leg is timed on foot with a bag, and any section longer than thirty minutes is broken with a stop that has shade, a toilet or a bench. Steep sections are avoided unless the view at the top is the reason for the walk.
The order also matters for the light. Routes that end on a river or a rooftop are timed to arrive in the last hour before sunset, and morning-only stops are placed first so that nothing is closed by the time you reach it.
The routes on file
Rome has a two day plan that keeps everything inside one walkable ring, with the ancient core on the first day and the museums across the river on the second. Paris has an afternoon loop that pairs a Roman arena in the Latin Quarter with the alpine beds of the botanical garden, and a longer route that covers the old quarters on the right bank. Athens runs from the rock down through the old streets to the harbour, and each of these has a distance, a duration and a list of the stops that can be dropped without breaking the route.
Timing, distance and when to start
Distances run between four and eleven miles depending on the route, and the durations assume a pace of roughly two and a half miles an hour with stops. Starting times are given for two seasons, because a walk that works in April becomes uncomfortable in August if the open sections fall between noon and three. Where a route uses public transport for one leg, the line and the stop are named rather than described.
What to bring, and what to leave
Comfortable shoes, water in a bottle you can refill, and a paper map of the centre are the whole list. Cash helps for the small entrances that do not take cards, and a light layer is worth carrying for the sections that cross a church or a museum where shoulders and knees have to be covered. A printed copy of the route is more useful than a phone with two percent battery, which is the reason every walk here can be downloaded as a single page.