In the city of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland

 “Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.” -- Robert Louis Stevenson

=====================================================================
(in the capital of Scotland) The city of Edinburgh and most of the council area, including the busy port of Leith on the Firth of Forth, lie within the historic county of Midlothian. The original burgh, now known as the Old Town, arose in the 11th century around Edinburgh Castle. In 1329 Robert the Bruce granted Edinburgh a town charter; it became the capital of the Scottish kingdom in 1437. The city was destroyed in 1544 in the border wars with England; its characteristic use of stone architecture began with this rebuilding. During the 18th century Scotland experienced a cultural and intellectual renaissance, and Edinburgh was home to luminaries David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott. The city expanded in the late 18th century with the development of the Georgian-style New Town, separated from the Old Town by a valley. Edinburgh is the center of Scottish culture and education, and is home to the University of Edinburgh, the National Library, the National Gallery, and the Royal Scottish Museum.

+ Edinburgh is a town intimately entwined with its landscape, with buildings and monuments perched atop crags and overshadowed by cliffs. From the Old Town’s jumble of medieval tenements piled high along the Royal Mile, its turreted skyline strung between the black, bull-nosed Castle Rock and the russet palisade of Salisbury Crags, to the New Town’s neat grid of neoclassical respectability, the city offers a constantly changing perspective.

+ Edinburgh is a city of high culture and lofty ideals, of art and literature, philosophy and science. It is here that the world's biggest arts festival is held each summer..

+ Edinburgh is also known as Auld Reekie, a down-to-earth place that flicks an impudent finger at the pretensions of the literati. It is the city that tempted Robert Louis Stevenson from his law lectures to explore the drinking dens and dazzling street life of the 19th-century Old Town. It is also the city of Beltane, the resurrected pagan May Day festival, where revellers dance in the flickering firelight of bonfires beneath the stony indifference of Calton Hill's pillared monuments.

+ Like a favorite book, Edinburgh is a city you will want to visit again and again, savouring a different experience each time -- the castle silhouetted against a blue spring sky with a yellow haze of daffodils misting the slopes below the esplanade; stumbling out of a late-night club into a summer dawn, with only the yawp of seagulls to break the unexpected silence; heading for a cafe on a chilly December morning with the fog snagging the spires of the Old Town; and festival fireworks crackling in the night sky as you stand, transfixed, amid the crowds in Princes Street Gardens.