Ninna-ji is the temple Kyoto's emperors ran themselves, and the start of the loveliest temple road in the city. Three and a half kilometres, best in the morning, joining two of the country's most famous sights along a lane built for walking.
Begin at the great Nio-mon gate of Ninna-ji, founded in 888 and headed by imperial princes for a thousand years. Its grove of Omuro-zakura — squat, late-blooming cherries that flower at eye level in mid-April, after everywhere else has dropped — sits beneath the five-storey pagoda; if the timing's right, build the day around it. Pay into the Goten, the abbot's residence, for a veranda you can sit on and a teien (garden) that borrows the pagoda into its view.
Then east along the Kinukake-no-michi, the road of draped silk, named for an emperor who hung a hill with white cloth to fake a summer snow. It rises gently past Ryoan-ji and its fifteen unreadable stones — go early — and runs on toward the Golden Pavilion. End at the Kinkaku-ji gate, or turn back when the temples blur. Both are honest endings.
