Tour Audio a Tirana

Albania under Enver Hoxha built roughly 173,000 concrete bunkers between 1967 and 1986, one for every four citizens, a project of such paranoid scale that the landscape is still studded with them. Tirana has found uses for some, turning them into cafes, art studios, and storage rooms, which is both practical and a useful metaphor for what the city has been doing since 1991. After decades of the most isolated communist regime in Europe, Tirana opened to the world and did not stop. Mayor Edi Rama, himself an artist before becoming prime minister, spent the early 2000s covering the city's communist-era apartment blocks in vivid color, which remains one of the more cheerful urban policies in post-communist Europe.

Skanderbeg Square at the centre of the city is one of the largest pedestrian squares in the Balkans, recently redesigned and generally pleasant to sit in.

The National History Museum on the square's north end is worth a visit for its spectacular Soviet-style mosaic mural covering the entire facade. The Blloku neighborhood, once the exclusive residential area of the communist elite where ordinary citizens were forbidden to enter, is now the city's best area for cafes, bars, and restaurants. The National Gallery of Arts has an interesting collection that includes socialist realist works alongside contemporary Albanian art.