Contemporary art in Beirut.
Live music in Dakar.
Vintage shopping in Bangkok.

The fetching Atlantic port of Essaouira lacks the fame and grandeur of more famous Moroccan cities like Casablanca, but that is exactly its draw.

After years of simmering, the Dubai food scene is at full boil. The emirate now boasts some 13,000 establishments and some are nabbing global laurels.

Big spaces and boldface names lead a stylish comeback for the City of Light. “We’re looking at a lovely year,” one chef says.

The Eternal City continues to live up to its name, thanks to some long-awaited reopenings and a crop of new restaurants and cultural spots all over town.

These days you can hardly hurl a ball of burrata without hitting an upstart pizzeria, including many created by folks from the Mecca of pizza-making itself: Naples.

In the prolific years before he was killed by a tortoise that had been dropped by an eagle, the celebrated Athenian playwright Aeschylus visited the ancient Greek theater of Syracuse to stage “Women of Etna.”

Like Thai boxing and Thai spices, Thai massage is not for the weak.

Arabic lesson No. 1: fenn. It means art, and it’s being uttered, printed and practiced like never before in Morocco’s “Jewel of the South.”

Funny, sly and fluent in Italian, he had been training recently to become a schoolteacher. I leaned against a wall, face to face with his terrible end once again.

Near nightfall I slid back down to camp. Jagged stars blazed overhead, like a van Gogh painting.

“We are trying to educate the public that coffee is exactly like wine,” Mr. Galhenage said. “It has its own taste and flavors that come from the region in which it is grown.”

“Nobody knew about Puglia or our way of eating, or our wines, or our producers,” Ms. Rascazzo said. “It was just Mafia, pizza, spaghetti — the usual things associated with the south.”

In El Jem, auto-parts shops and a few downbeat restaurants lined the main street. But as I wheeled my suitcase through the dust, the object of my quest appeared at the end of the thoroughfare.

Dolled-up young professionals, cigar-smoking captains of industry and local celebrities fill the plush red booths and chairs to watch more than a dozen musical acts belt out a globetrotting playlist.

“I wanted to evoke the kind of craziness that animated Russia and Moscow some years back,” Mr. Starck explained, referring to the heady 1990s, when post-Soviet greed and lawlessness were at their peak.

Looking like the unlikely offspring of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Darth Vader, the trio grinds to club music next to a crowded outdoor pool by the beach.