The Best Destinations in the World: The 2021 Gold List

There’s really something special about Philadelphia, about the way it doesn’t care for pretense or about what anyone else thinks of it. One place I return to both in daydream and reality is Fairmount Park, behind the famed art museum, and the miles-long pathway that traces a circle around that part of the Schuylkill River. I think about the Italian Market and its small world of vendors, about the mosaics glinting in the sun, the digestible chaos of Chinatown, the essential, if flawed, sense of American history, the beautiful, dilapidated row houses that speak to the promise of equality we haven’t yet reached as a country. Spiritually, it’s my city. —Betsy Blumenthal