That’s pretty much anywhere on the Med, but we’ve narrowed it down further. There is, after all, no point going to a city that just isn’t equipped for an alfresco adventure. What you want from your summer city, apart from the requisite blue skies, is shady parks, sultry street life and a sea breeze. And here’s the clincher: there should also be a fine beach close at hand for a quenching dip. Sand between your toes, picnics, cocktails on terraces, seafood that’s just leapt onto your plate: that’s the way to welcome summer. We sent our writers to sample the best cities under the sun.

• Unless stated, all hotel prices are based on two sharing the cheapest double room in June, B&B; package prices are also for June, and are per person, based on two sharing including flights from London and transfers. For regional or Irish options, contact the operator

  Dubrovnik

  Why here? Because, thanks to being smacked by 2,000 shells in the Balkan war, plucky Dubrovnik is now the loveliest medieval city under the sun. Unesco restoration has turned the white-walled, green-shuttered Old Town into a kind of hyper-romantic version of its former self, and burghers with big hoses swoosh down the streets every morning to keep it looking maximum shiny.

  Cars are banned inside the city walls, and just as well: it’s essentially an outdoor place where you fritter away the days sliding from cobblestoned cafe to rooftop restaurant, patrolling the ramparts to check for sunsets and perhaps taking in a recital at the summer-long arts festival — most are staged alfresco in the gorgeous courts and cloisters of Dubrovnik’s baroque palaces.

  The best base: for a quick-hit break, you can’t beat the madly expensive Pucic Palace (00 385 20-326200, www.thepucicpalace.com; from £364), across the square from the Rector’s Palace and plump with Renaissance-nobleman plushness. The only other Old Town hotel is trim and tiny Stari Grad (322244, www.hotelstarigrad.com; £93), with a fab breakfast terrace among the chimneypots.

  In the city: Dubrovnians still talk about Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hamlet at the 1989 arts festival, staged atop a 15th-century turret at Lovrjenac fortress. It must have been amazing — but you can tell that the scenery was the star. The fact is, the whole of Dubrovnik’s Old Town looks as if it has been delivered wholesale from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s set department.

  The way to get your bearings is on an hour-long circuit of the stupendous city battlements (9am-7.30pm; £3): you can pay extra for a headphone history, or just enjoy scrambling around the Escher-like collection of helter-skelter stairways and crumbling catwalks, all poised on high cliffs against the very bluest bit of the Adriatic. Or pinkest, if you go at sundown (and you should).

  If you can wait until the festival, (July 10-August 25; www.dubrovnik-festival.hr), torches blaze outside the Revelin fortress and the Rector’s Palace to denote that music or theatre is being prepared within. And the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra (www.dso.hr) makes a perpetual tour of the city’s gothic-arched galleries and courtyards from spring until late autumn: just follow the flames.

  Otherwise, the textbook day here begins idly, with some gentle people-watching over coffee and cakes at the Viennese-style Gradska Kavana cafe, then drifts on into Gundulic Square for a turn around the villagey veg market, where headscarved rustics sell figs, pomegranates and bottles of travarica, the fennel-sprigged local firewater.

  Then things get lazier still. Lunch on fresh and garlicky squid at Lokanda Peskarija, five paces from the quayside in the old harbour, then do some shady shopping in the thin alleyways off Stradun, Dubrovnik’s marble-lined main drag.

  The place for sundowners is Bar Buza, on a craggy platform crammed between the citadel and the sea (ask a local to point the way). The place for dinner is Taverna Rustica (part of the Hotel Excelsior; 353353), where posh steaks and seafood are served on a candlelit terrace with views of the ramparts.

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