Sex, drugs, and Vincent van Gogh—all on view and just part of a voyeur's paradise. But Gully Wells goes deeper into the layered mysteries of a rapidly evolving city

They are the immortal stars of Amsterdam, their faces so iconic that they need no name or introduction, as they calmly stare back at you from postcards, newspapers, museum catalogs—and, of course, ubiquitous plastic shopping bags, the ultimate proof of twenty-first-century megastardom. The girl has intelligent, dark, haunting (haunted?) eyes and a Mona Lisa smile, and her picture exists only in black and white. The two men could not be less alike, although both images are self-portraits. The oil painting shows a young man with a red beard gazing out with troubled cornflower-blue eyes. In the etching, the artist stares at you pop-eyed with amazement, frizzy hair topped by a velvet cap, mouth agape. When it comes to his nose, he has obviously decided against flattery, presenting a bulbous strawberry, just as it must have looked to him in the mirror.

Anne Frank. Vincent van Gogh. Rembrandt van Rijn. In Amsterdam there is no escaping this eternal trio. And so, I decided, who better to take along as my part-time guides to the layered mysteries of their shared city? Of course, I met plenty of other people along the way—real live people whose stories illuminated different aspects of modern-day Amsterdam: Ed van Thijn, the former mayor whose childhood had been spent hiding from the Nazis; Emily Parker, a young black American who works for Heineken, that ur-bastion of conservative white male Dutch commerce; Jacob Dekker, whose business empire stretches from Japan to New York, Key West, Curacao, Amsterdam, and East Africa; and Tracy Metz, an American journalist who married a Dutchman and cheerfully resigned herself to never truly understanding the place where she now lives.

And then there were the people I met in chance encounters: the elderly couple who stopped me on the street to ask the way to the Torture Museum (why me? why them?); the apple-cheeked English nurse who took me to a coffee shop and offered me a joint so strong that I had to abandon it and her, retreating ignominiously to the sidewalk outside for gulps of fresh air; and the cabdriver Hussein, whose name alone confined him to an invisible ghetto. They all contributed to the collage forming in my mind, but still I found myself returning again and again, almost involuntarily, to my three ghostly lodestars.

The morning I arrived in Am-sterdam, a note was delivered by messenger to my hotel, inviting me to celebrate Vincent van Gogh's one hundred fiftieth birthday by attending a show, previewing that night at his eponymous museum. Ingeniously, the idea was to get Vincent himself, from beyond the grave, to curate the exhibition. "Vincent's Choice" consisted of paintings he had mentioned in his letters, as well as works by artists whom he had admired, ranging from a sublime Rembrandt at one end of the scale to a treacly pre-Raphaelite portrait of a swooning Christ at the other, with plenty of his own genius scattered throughout.

Before the event, I had a day to explore the heart of Amsterdam, around three supremely beautiful tree-lined canals: the Prinsengracht, the Keizersgracht, and the Herengracht. They were constructed early in the seventeenth century to provide a setting for the houses of the aristocracy and the nouveaux riches of the Golden Age—the age of Rembrandt—in the grandeur that they so richly deserved. Calvin may have warned that "God seasons the sweetness of wealth with vinegar," but you have to assume, as you walk along the canals today, that God must have decided to skip the vinegar when it came to the city's architecture, and to sprinkle it on some other aspect of those good people's lives.