This is the literary corner of Pest, a short walk along one boulevard that strings together the country's first museum, its oldest university buildings, and a run of bookshops that have outlasted three regimes. It works in any weather — the museum and the shops are roofs when you need them — and it's best in the afternoon, when the students are about and the antikvárium windows catch the light.
Start at Kálvin tér, where two metro lines cross under a Calvinist church, and walk north up Múzeum körút. The second-hand and antiquarian bookshops cluster along here; browse one for the old Budapest prints whether or not you read the language. Then the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum rises on its colonnade — by legend the cradle of the 1848 revolution, declaimed from its steps.
Slip behind it into the Museum Garden, a free and almost secret patch of statues and benches, then drift through the ELTE university streets, where the scale drops to lecture halls and students. The boulevard lands you at Astoria, named for the corner hotel, with the M2 waiting underneath.
