Instead of Amsterdam: Delft, the Blue Pottery City Where Vermeer Painted the Light

Amsterdam is a fantastic city drowning in its own tourist success: the red-light district has become a theme park, the coffee shops attract visitors more for transgression than culture, and the Jordaan canals — once a working-class neighbourhood — are now one of the most expensive real-estate markets in Europe. If you are looking for the Netherlands of canals, bicycles and the light that entered the paintings of the Dutch Masters, go to Delft.

Delft is Vermeer's city, and here you understand why he painted as he did: the light that enters through windows overlooking the canals has a particular quality — soft and enveloping — that shifts with the seasons and the clouds. Walking along the Oude Delft — the city's oldest canal — is like moving inside a seventeenth-century painting.

The market square — Markt — is dominated by the Nieuwe Kerk, where the Dutch royal family is buried, and by the Renaissance Town Hall. The space is open and airy, and on Thursday mornings it becomes a market selling cheeses, herring, flowers and fabrics. The atmosphere is that of a living city, not a museum.

Royal Delft — the blue porcelain factory — is the only one remaining of the thirty-two that operated in the seventeenth century. You can tour the factory, watch the craftspeople hand-painting traditional motifs, and understand why Delft ceramics were for centuries Europe's ultimate luxury. The shop sells original pieces at (surprisingly) accessible prices.

The Vermeer Centrum Delft tells the life and work of the painter in the context of his city: the streets he depicted, the houses where he lived, the light he sought. It holds no original paintings — those are in The Hague and Amsterdam — but it offers an understanding of the artist that no museum can provide.

Delft is also a university city (TU Delft is one of Europe's finest technical universities) and this gives it a young energy: craft-beer pubs, Indonesian restaurants (a colonial legacy), cafés where people study and chat until evening. Prices are those of the Netherlands — not cheap — but significantly lower than Amsterdam.

From Delft you can reach The Hague in fifteen minutes by train (the Mauritshuis, home of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, is there), Rotterdam in twelve, and Amsterdam in one hour. It is the perfect base for a different Netherlands.