The US's fifth-largest city is most famous for three things: its pivotal place in American history, the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team - and a leading brand of cream cheese.
Fortunately in the last few decades it's also become a cultural and gastronomic powerhouse, with plenty of art museums, theatres, nightclubs and restaurants now complementing its full hand of American independence monuments.
'Philly' is where American government was born in the 18th century, when the city was a hotbed of revolutionary thinking. Once the second largest city in the British empire (after London) it also stood in as temporary capital of the spanking new United States of America in the late 1700s.
Laid out in a grid on the west bank of the Delaware River, Philadelphia boasts an area so crammed with important museums and monuments that it's known as America's ¿most historic square mile'. At the heart of this hallowed zone is Independence National Historic Park, in whose Independence Hall the Declaration of Independence was approved on 4 July 1776.
Over a million visitors a year also invade the new Liberty Bell Center to get an eyeful of the 936kg Liberty Bell, although its tolling days ended soon after it cracked doing the honours for George Washington's birthday in the 1830s - at least, that's one theory.
Further west, culture vultures can feed for days on Museum Row, the unofficial name of the mile-long Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which runs from City Hall to the huge Museum of Art in 900-acre Fairmont Park, and takes in the Rodin Museum and the Franklin Institute Science Museum.
In Center City, Chinatown has great food on the cheap, and so has the Reading Terminal Market where you can also spot Amish farmers peddling their wares. But the best outdoor market in town - and America's oldest - is the eclectic Italian Market on 9th Street.
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