Antwerp is a city that made its fortune twice and will tell you about both. In the sixteenth century it was the richest trading port in northern Europe, a place of merchants, printers and painters on the Scheldt, until war and the closing of the river sent the money elsewhere. Then the port revived, and today it is the second largest in Europe, a vast maze of docks, cranes and chemical plants running north of the old town, with about four hundred and sixty thousand people living in the city itself.
At the centre, the Cathedral of Our Lady lifts its single tall spire above the old streets, and inside it hangs Rubens's Descent from the Cross, one of the great paintings of the Baroque. Rubens lived and worked in the city, and his house is a short walk away. Nearby, the Plantin-Moretus Museum preserves the printing house of the family who turned Antwerp into a publishing capital, with its sixteenth-century presses and type still in place. Around Central Station, a railway palace of stone and glass built in the early twentieth century, the diamond district still handles a large share of the world's rough stones.
The riding is hardly the point here: Antwerp's centre is a tangle of cobbled lanes, trams and one-way systems, and the ring road, the R1, is among the busiest in Belgium, with heavy truck traffic and constant lane changes. Treat the city as a base and head out by the quieter roads to the east and north. The Campine country towards Wortel and Hoogstraten is flat, sandy and wooded, with long, quiet lanes between fields and pine, and the beguinage in Mechelen to the south, a walled enclave of small houses and gardens, is the sort of quiet that cities forget. Cobbles, tram tracks and wet leaves are the hazards, and the weather in Flanders can turn grey without warning.
Fuel is no problem in a city this size, and neither is food. Go for a paper cone of fries from a frietkot with a dollop of mayonnaise, or a bowl of stoofvlees, beef stewed in dark beer. The old town has brown cafes that serve Belgian beer by the glass, and the sweet shops sell Antwerpse handjes, small biscuits shaped like hands, a reference to a legend about a giant and a severed hand. May and September are the best months, when the terraces are open and the light is gentle on the stone.