TRAVELING IN STYLE : STREET WISDOM : TO UNDERSTAND AND EMBRACE ITS CHARACTER, TO FEEL A CITY’S THROB, TO BE SWEPT UP IN ITS SPIRIT, IS TO WALK ITS STREETS

New York’s skyline can be dazzling, Rio’s beaches enchanting, Paris’ museums engaging, London’s hotels luxurious and Brussels’ restaurants memorable, but if any one thing marks the distinct character of a city, it is its streets. To understand and embrace that character, to feel a city’s throb, to be swept up in its spirit, is to walk its streets--be they grand boulevards or pedestrian malls, shop-lined avenues or landscaped lanes. Here is where a city

bares its soul.

There are famous streets and favorite streets; different streets to stroll when shopping or searching for a place to eat, when feeling romantic or scholarly or simply curious.

For example, in New York, for art and architecture, there is Fifth Avenue north of 59th Street, past the Frick, Metropolitan, Guggenheim, Cooper-Hewitt, Design, Jewish, and Photography museums, to about 94th Street. For styles and shopping, walk down Madison Avenue from 94th Street to 59th Street. Then there is Lexington Avenue, from 59th Street south to 42nd Street and Grand Central Terminal, a stretch that’s a crush of stores and people, restaurants and food stands that gives New York its special, frantic ambiance.

For a neighborhood flavor, my personal choice as a born-and-bred New Yorker is West 72nd Street. From Central Park West and the hulking Dakota west to Riverside Drive, the street, as long as I can remember it, has always had an engaging array of ethnic restaurants, convenience stores, bakeries, cafes, a bar or two, a mix of apartment towers and old graystone and brownstone houses, plus a hearty goulash of sidewalk characters.

At the intersection of 72nd Street and Broadway, at the entrance to the IRT subway, there is one of those great, sprawling newsstands where one can get the morning newspaper the night before. It is something I still do when I return to the neighborhood, crossing the street to read the paper standing up at a snack bar at Amsterdam Avenue, consuming a hot dog and an orange drink, or, better yet, farther along 72nd Street, sitting down in a bakery, with a piece of pastry and a cup of coffee, or in a Chinese restaurant, while indulging in a steaming bowl of wor wonton soup. To me, in my extended youth, 72nd Street was Paris, London, Vienna and Hong Kong. Now I know it to be simply my favorite street in New York.

When I eventually did get to Paris, I found the streets there as diverse and diverting as New York’s. For shopping there is Boulevard Hausmann with its department stores, or Victor Hugo Avenue or Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore for the smart shops; for street scenes, Boulevards Saint Germain or Saint Michel. And for me, there are sentimental streets: Boulevard de Reuilly in unfashionable east Paris, where my youngest son learned to walk holding my hand, and in the Marais, where my father once lived. Now brimming with new museums, galleries, shops and restaurants, the Marais is a promenader’s pleasure, if only to circle the Place des Vosges, or to meander from the Centre Pompidou to the Place de la Bastille.

But for instant identity and grand tradition there is still only the Champs Elysees. Though the broad avenue may be getting a little seedy, overrun with teen-agers and tourists, too many car showrooms and airline offices and not enough good bistros, the Champs Elysees perseveres. What particularly attracts me there is not what lines the street, but the view of what anchors the grand avenue: at the top is the Arc de Triomphe, and below, the Place de la Concorde. It is a scintillating scene that on select nights, when the arch is spotlighted in the French tricolors, sends shivers up and down my spine. It might be hokey, but for me there is no scene, and therefore no street, more French. It almost commands that you sit at one of the overpriced cafes on the street and toast the scene with a glass of wine.

For a street that does not awe, but rather teases, flirts, then embraces and sweeps you away, it is the Ramblas in Barcelona. “It is the most exciting street in the world,” W. Somerset Maugham declared. It is hard to take issue with the late British author’s judgment of this Spanish delight.

The Ramblas is a street for staring, be it at the architecture, at the book, bird or flower stalls, the sidewalk cafes, the art nouveau signs, well-dressed couples on the way to the opera, punk-styled teen-agers going nowhere, gaping tourists, sophisticated travelers, backpackers from the Costa Brava, tannned jet-setters from Mallorca in town for a night, the obvious prostitutes, the not-so-obvious pickpockets, or the Catalans themselves, who daily promenade along the broad walkway beneath a canopy of trees. Small wonder that the young Picasso used the passing scene and its myriad personalities as studies for his sketches.

The Ramblas also encourages idling. From the Plaza de Catalunya, about a mile down to the Columbus Monument heralding the city’s waterfront, the street has dozens of places where one can pass a few hours doing nothing. My favorite spot is the section known as the Rambla de los Capuchinos, with its pavement designed and decorated by Spanish artist Joan Miro. Here also is the Boqueria--a colorful public market jammed with food stalls--next to the Liceo, a gilded 19th-Century opera house, and a few steps beyond the Palacio Guell, designed by Antonio Gaudi in his singular style. It is a marvelous sweep of architecture, viewed best, at least for me, from the Cafe de La Opera. Not much more than a double row of tables and chairs placed on the edge of the pavement, the cafe offers a front-row seat on the Ramblas, and a nice place to catch one’s breath. For a seamier view, stroll farther down the Ramblas, past the beer houses, some excellent restaurants, souvenir shops and a subdued red-light district. And always on the Ramblas there are open cafes, beckoning one to sit and enjoy what amounts to the passing festival of life.

Because Amsterdam originally was laid out in a crescent shape accented by canals, one must link a few meandering streets together to form a portrait of the Venice of the North. Start at Dam Square, which, if not the center of the city, is its heart, dominated by the Royal Palace in all its 17th-Century Dutch Classical glory. Off the square is the Kalverstaat, a bustling pedestrian street leading to the Muntplein, marked by the ornamented Mint Tower and sitting on a bridge at the juncture of the Amstel River and Singel Canal--a nice place to gaze at water traffic.

Along the Singel to the right (north) is a floating flower market. There, too, as along the parallel Herengracht and Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht canals, one senses in the stately waterside structures the singularity of Amsterdam. Then it is left onto the Leidsestraat, a street shared by pedestrians and trolleys, to check out the shops and passing crowds, and to stroll over a succession of canal bridges to the Leidseplein. My walk usually ends at a cafe (near a canal) that has chairs spilling out onto the street. It is a scene distinctly Dutch.

There is no mistaking the streets of the Ginza in central Tokyo, with their department stores, engaging window displays, fashionable boutiques, theaters, restaurants and, most of all, throngs of people. It is easy to get caught up and be swept away in the crowds. So, for a lofty perspective, I suggest the second-floor restaurant of the Mitsukoshi department store at the corner of Harumidori and Chuo-dori avenues. By all means, also edge your way into the various arcades with their pristine food stalls and shops brimming with merchandise. I tend to think of the Ginza as one great department store, with the streets as its aisles, the stores as the counters, and everywhere crowds. It gives you the feeling that you are in the vortex of not merely a city, but the world.

For a taste of Hong Kong, I again recommend not one street but rather a web of streets and alleys. The web lies in the Western District off Des Voux and Queens roads, up and down the narrow alleys that serve as walkways, such as Man Wa Lane, and Wing Lok and Ladder streets. There, past the barber chairs and the ever-crowded food stands, under a cluster of signs, are jewelry, antique, herb and tea stores; clothing and fabric boutiques; even shops that sells snakes. It is window-shopping heaven, better than most museums, if only because you can stop once in a while and have a cup of tea or a bowl of soup. For me, those are indelible memories of Hong Kong.

Less frenetic but no less engaging is the pedestrian street in Munich from Karlsplatz, through the Karlstor, the 14th-Century gate to the old city, past the Renaissance facade of St. Michael’s Church, to the Marienplatz, the central square with its old (1474) and new (1909) town halls. The buildings are interesting, but more fun are the beer halls, restaurants and cafes that, when the weather is good, spill out onto the street, turning it into one big party, seemingly reverberating with the clinking of beer mugs swaying as one to the music of a parade of street performers. It is easy to fall in step. Und ja wohl , the marvelous Munich beer helps.

In the same spirit is the Stroget in Copenhagen. It is Denmark distilled, the country’s wares and food, people and styles, on display. Emphasizing food and people is the Rue des Bouchers in Brussels. In Rome these days, the street for strolling, window-shopping and people-watching is the Via Condotti, its scenes forever changing, keeping pace with the styles. But for a sense of the history that layers Rome, I cannot resist walking past the oversized wedding cake that is the Victor Emmanuel Monument, to climb the steps to the Piazza dei Campidoglio, designed by Michelangelo. From its terrace you have a fascinating imperial view of the ruins of the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and much more of Rome.

For history and tradition, and a hint of current politics, few cities can match those stretches in London that lead a pedestrian to Charing Cross from Trafalgar Square then down Whitehall, past the Admiralty Building, with a detouring peek at No. 10 Downing St., to Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament. It is a walk I once took daily while working briefly in London, and it never bored me. To me those streets are London in all its pomp and circumstance.

The list can go on and on. Almost every city has its special streets: Jerusalem, through the Jaffa Gate along King David Street; East Berlin, from the Brandenburg Gate, along the Unter den Linden, to Alexanderplatz; Zurich, the Bahnhofstrasse, from the train station to the lake, and in Baden Baden, Lichtentaler Allee, following the River Oos from the center of the comfortable spa resort and its belle epoque architecture to Kloster Lichtenthal, a 15th-Century abbey.

All reveal the essence of their individual cities and all beckon to come and explore.