These days, the tourist authorities play down the mobster era; few traces of the hoodlum years exist, and those that do owe more to Hollywood than contemporary Chicago. Today, Chicago`s towering skyline – the city has one of the world`s best collections of modern architecture, from Frank Lloyd Wright houses to the 110-story Sears Tower – dominates the pancake-flat prairies for hundreds of miles around. Chicago`s status as the cultural and financial heart of Middle America is beyond question. The Loop downtown holds the head offices of many major US companies and some of the nation`s most important commodity markets, which together handle the buying and selling of one-third of the world`s agricultural and industrial products.

For visitors, Chicago offers the Art Institute of Chicago and a wide range of excellent museums (many of which have one day of free admission per week), restaurants, sports and highbrow cultural activities. However, its strongest suit is live music, with a phenomenal array of jazz and blues clubs packed into the back rooms of its amiable bars and cafés. The rock scene is also one of the healthiest in the country with a prolific number of bands having come out of the city in the 1990s, including Smashing Pumpkins, Material Issue, Veruca Salt and Wilco. And almost everything is noticeably less expensive than in other US cities – eating out, for example, costs much less than in New York or LA, but is every bit as good.

Chicagoans are proud of their city and usually keen to point out its best features. Two great ways to get a real feel for the city are to head out to ivy-covered Wrigley Field on a sunny summer afternoon to catch baseball`s Cubs in action, or take a cruise boat under the bridges of the Chicago River at sunset. This large and diverse city is many things at once -- a blue-collar town that`s full of high culture and gracious living; a town of historical importance.