Vlad the Impaler, Surrealism, a deranged dictator—all are part of Bucharest's story. But now, with Romania joining the European Union, the capital is on a roll. G.Y. Dryansky reports

Gourmets of the picturesque should stay away from Bucharest: There are no open-roofed buses, no horse carriages, no lines of the camera-laden outside fabled monuments. But if you travel either for pleasure or for edification—one would hope for both—you won't come back from Bucharest empty-minded. A decade and a half after liberation from insane tyranny, this city is "bubbling like new wine," a friend of a friend who lives here told me when I arrived. Ovidiu Morar, a book publisher who became another friend, added a caution: "You'll need two days before you begin to see beneath the mess."

It didn't take that long. Enough hotels are world-class. Clubbers whose feet get restless at night will have no trouble knowing where to go. In this city noted for its plethora of lovely churches, they are now outnumbered by discotheques, and there are even more restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. The cuisine has caught up with the state of the art elsewhere, while not yet in prices. Here, you can eat the cooking of almost any culture in the world, as well as stylish fusions of several, and for those with an affinity for the hearty (and good defenses against heartburn), traditional Romanian food lives on.

For the price of a cup of coffee in Paris, I sat in the front row of the Atheneum, a hall with acoustics second only, perhaps, to those of Milan's La Scala, and listened to Ilinca Dumitrescu, a world-renowned piano virtuoso, play hours of Mozart. A loge to myself at the National Opera House for a charming performance of The Barber of Seville came to about $7.50. The Russians introduced the Stanislavsky technique—the Method that in New York gave the world Marlon Brando—to Romanian theater, and this keeps the standards high for acting.

I thought of the sweating tour groups tracking The Da Vinci Code in the hallways of the Louvre while I spent time—with no one else around—in front of a big painting that is one of Rembrandt's most moving works, even with touches by his studio. Haman Begging the Pardon of Esther is a sure sibling of the artist's Return of the Prodigal Son, a treasure of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Bucharest's National Museum of Art of Romania, a neoclassic royal palace and an eyeful in its own right, houses Rembrandts, El Grecos, Breughels (father and son), an extraordinary Courbet winter landscape auguring Cézanne, and, among the Rubenses, Hercules and the Nemean Lion—which, had Delacroix seen it, he would have looked at long and hard. In the wing of the Romanians, there's a roomful of early Brancusi sculpture such as you won't find elsewhere, demonstrating how he left his master Rodin behind in a more advanced form of expression.

All of this amounts to a bouquet of attractions to relish in a destination, and yet Bucharest appeals even more deeply to your sensibility. This city—which has been the seat of communism, fascism, monarchy, and fragile democracy and is now about to join the European Union—is a great material metaphor. From the time of late feudalism, it fostered the humanism and wealth that followed the Enlightenment—and legal slavery as well. I'm talking about a city at an obscure edge of Europe that is nothing less than a paradigm of the tortuous progress of our civilization.