Architectural Digest's 27 Most Beautiful Cities in the World

"Creating a definitive list of the most beautiful cities in the world is a downright impossible task. Depending on who you ask, you'd yield wildly different results. Frank Lloyd Wright judged a city's beauty on architecture (he was a Chicago fan), while Ezra Pound was taken by the poetry of a place's sky at night. Walt Whitman said it's the people that make a city great, and Aristotle pointed out that 'a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.' All this to say, our list is by no means definitive. Twenty-seven cities is far too few to sum up all the world's beauty. But we have taken a stab at highlighting some supremely spectacular places, from the remote beaches of the Caribbean to the cultural capital of Japan. Some cities are hubs for contemporary architecture, while others have preserved a time long past. A number of places on this list are densely populated, while at least one has a population in the mere thousands." - architecturaldigest.com