Fishermen’s Bastion terraces separating St. Matthias Church from the Danube below. (Expedia)

Budapest was listed No. 60 out of 80 cities ranked by “elegance” in the survey of the world’s top elegant cities by the international marketing firm Zalando (see my last post, “Beauty vs. elegance in cities“). Tel Aviv, famed for its early modern architecture, was ranked 59th. This tells us all we need to know about the survey. Even the architecture of fabulously beautiful Budapest ranked low – although that of Tel Aviv ranked even lower. The takeaway from that survey was: please don’t confuse elegance with beauty!

So here is one of Expedia’s generally well-done travel videos, on Budapest. Since there is so much beauty, the videographer seemed to feel obliged to speed through the city’s sights and left most of the lingering closeups I like so much on the cutting room floor. Also, I would rather its narrator had spoken English with at least something of a Hungarian accent. That would probably have pleased my dear mother-in-law, Agnes. But at least the video was almost wholly free of modern architecture, except for a few buildings on the edges that the camera was unable to avoid. In the screenshots collected with this post I have featured scenes through arches and colonnades, plus a series of shots of the city’s fabled public swimming pools.

Full disclosure: My wife, Victoria Somlo, is of full Hungarian descent and I am a quarter Hungarian, but my bias is purely aesthetic. I hope we can visit the city someday.

(By the way, the link to the Expedia video of Budapest begins a chain of Expedia videos that takes you to Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, Manchester, Liverpool, London, Paris, Rome, Venice and I don’t know how many others, all exquisitely well made – except, I’d say, for Manchester and Liverpool, whose editors did not leave as much modern architecture on the cutting room floor as the others did.)