Puppet shows, thermal baths, a large botanical garden

with Himalayan plants and a lively historic center American author John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, said   that the Russians who had led a virtuous life did not go to heaven, but to Georgia. Tbilisi , its capital, of one million inhabitants, proposes a journey through time. At the same time a camp of Persian caravans, a Czarist capital, a booty of Mongols, an Ottoman labyrinth and an old Soviet showcase that begins to be populated with invasive skyscrapers. Geographically already in Asia, in its decline and its simultaneous strength offers a decided image of European city at once exotic and familiar.

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