There's a superb view of the city from its roof, if you can face the climb. Inside there is a fine painting by Goya in one of the side chapels (on your right facing the altar) showing St Francis Borja at the deathbed of an already cadaverous impenitent at whose shoulder crouch a set of devils gleefully grimacing in expectation of his soul. The chapel is that of the noble Valencian family Borja, better known as Borgia, whose members in Renaissance Italy included the notorious Lucrezia and Cesare and that most flamboyantly corrupt of popes, Alexander VI.Bracing brunchBook ahead (00 34 963 922 448) for the justly popular Barbacoa at Plaza del Carmen 6. The name means barbecue, and that's what it does supremely well.Cultural afternoonValencia, like Barcelona and Bilbao, is very conscious of the power of contemporary architecture to raise a city's profile in the world. Its flagship project, begun 10 years ago and still in progress, is La Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciences (City of Arts and Sciences; 0034 902 100 031, ); a site on the former bed of the Turia is being redeveloped as a vast cultural and intellectual leisure zone. Among the buildings already completed are L'Hemisferic, a giant Imax cinema, planetarium and laserium, and the Museum of Science, with a constantly changing series of displays, many of them interactive and very popular with children.

These dramatic and audacious works are both by the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, who has been acclaimed across the world. Calatrava's massive but elegant seedpod of an opera house, now well advanced on the site and expected to open in 2003, will be the spectacular centrepiece of the Ciutat. Also under construction is an oceanographic theme park.The icing on the cakeFor a snack, try a glass of the local speciality, horchata, a refreshing milky drink made from tiger nuts and served with fartons, long thin sponge cakes to nibble between sips. There are horchaterias throughout the city, but there is a good one beside the Mercado Central entrance. The other traditional snack is hot chocolate with churros – essentially long deep-fried strips of dough, rolled in sugar and used for dipping. Popular at breakfast and throughout the day and available at any caf?. Sulmo mihi patria est, gelidus uberrimus undis Milia qui novies distat ab urbe decem.

He was born at Sulmo, now Sulmona, in the beautiful Abruzzo district in central Italy, in 43BC. In this couplet he describes it as "a land rich in ice-cold streams, ninety miles from Rome", an accurate geographical description even now. These days Sulmona is a charming medieval town which, with its lack of tourists and sleepy surrounding countryside, is simply a nice place for literary tourists to combine a literary pilgrimage with a countryside break.Literary pilgrimage? Does that mean we get to put flowers on his grave?No, he's not buried here. He died in exile in what is now Constanza on Romania's Black Sea coast – a dreary place with little more than a few caf? a dusty Roman museum, and ferries to Turkey. Abruzzo must have seemed very far away.If it's so nice, why didn't he want to come back?The poet loved the city, and Sulmo was, then as now, the antithesis of the excitement of Rome. Ovid was not the scruffy bohemian type content to live in a country cottage and spin out ditties, but a Roman at heart – urbane and sophisticated in wit and taste.