Lipótváros: the Parliament and Liberty Square
The vast riverside Parliament, a domed basilica, and the squares of official Pest between them. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. St Stephen's Basilica
Start at the great domed church named for Hungary's first king, its dome the same height as the Parliament's by deliberate design — nothing in Pest was allowed to rise above either. The mummified right hand of St Stephen is kept in a side chapel. Climb the dome later if you want the city laid flat below you.

2. Szabadság tér
Walk north to Liberty Square, the grandest of the Lipótváros squares, ringed by banks and the old stock exchange. The square carries the city's contested history on its face: a Soviet war memorial still stands at one end, an American embassy at another. Read it slowly.

3. Hungarian National Bank
On the square's east side, the bank building carries a frieze of carved reliefs around it — harvest, industry, trade, the whole programme of a young nation. Walk the base and look up; it's the kind of detail you pass without seeing unless told to look.

4. Kossuth Lajos tér
The ceremonial square in front of the Parliament, named for the 1848 revolutionary. The memorials cluster here — the Kossuth statue, the 1956 flame, the Imre Nagy bronze nearby. The square was relaid in the 2010s to a pre-war design; it's the formal approach the Parliament was built to face.

5. Hungarian Parliament
The river front of the Parliament is the one to see — nearly 700 rooms of neo-Gothic spires running along the Danube, finished in 1904, modelled partly on Westminster. Walk the embankment side for the full length of it. Tours go inside; book ahead if you want the dome hall and the crown jewels.

6. Shoes on the Danube Bank
South along the embankment, sixty pairs of iron shoes cast onto the stone — a memorial to those shot into the river here in the winter of 1944–45. The most quietly devastating thing on the Pest waterfront. Stand with it before you go.

Lipótváros: the Parliament and Liberty Square