Dublin

In 1759, while the rest of Europe was fighting the Seven Years' War, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on a rundown Dublin brewery. He paid £45 a year for four acres of land and a vision that would outlast empires.

Dublin started as a Viking settlement in 841 AD. Norse raiders built a fortified camp called a longphort where the rivers Liffey and Poddle meet. They traded, raided, and intermarried with locals for nearly two centuries until Irish High King Brian Boru crushed them at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The city changed hands repeatedly. Normans took over in 1170. English rule tightened for centuries. By the 1800s, Dublin was the second-largest city in the British Empire, filled with Georgian architecture and grinding poverty existing side by side.

The Great Famine of 1845 to 1849 devastated Ireland. About one million people died. Another million emigrated, many departing from Dublin's docks. The population dropped by a quarter. Haunting bronze statues along Custom House Quay commemorate those who walked to the ships.

Then came 1916. On Easter Monday, April 24th, Patrick Pearse stood outside the General Post Office and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The British shelled the GPO and executed the rebel leaders. But the Rising sparked a revolution that led to Irish independence in 1922.

Dublin produced more literary giants per square mile than almost anywhere on Earth. James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift. Three Nobel Prize winners in literature. The city even named bridges after its writers.

Visit Trinity College to see the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript from around 800 AD that medieval scribes called "the most precious object in the Western world." The Long Room library nearby holds 200,000 of the college's oldest books. 

Tour the GPO Museum to walk through the Easter Rising story, complete with bullet holes still visible in the pillars. The Guinness Storehouse explains how one man's absurd lease became the world's most famous stout, with a pint waiting at the rooftop bar.

Dublin has around 1,000 pubs. Start at Temple Bar for the tourist experience, then escape to Grogan's or Toner's for the real thing. Order fish and chips, a full Irish breakfast, or coddle, the local stew of sausages and bacon that Dubliners swear by.