Architectural historian T. J. Collins designed many of the late 19th-century commercial buildings that still define downtown Staunton, giving the central districts unusual visual coherence. The city has five separate historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places - the Beverley, Newtown, Gospel Hill, Stuart Addition, and Wharf areas - each with its own character. The downtown grid is small enough to walk in an afternoon. The city runs a free trolley for visitors who prefer not to climb the hills. Public parking is plentiful and the worst traffic problem most days is too many pedestrians at the same crosswalk.

It is rare for a city this size to support a major Shakespeare company, a four-year university, a presidential birthplace and library, a fine-dining destination on national lists, and a working antebellum architectural style. Staunton has all of these at once. The Blackfriars Playhouse, the world's first recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theater, opened in 2001. The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and the Manse where the 28th president was born in 1856 sit at the foot of Coalter Street. Mary Baldwin University, founded in 1842, runs the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership cadet corps - the only all-female corps of cadets in the world. The Frontier Culture Museum, on the city's outskirts, reassembles relocated buildings from England, Ireland, Germany, and Nigeria. None of these institutions were imported wholesale. Most grew here. They built on each other.

Staunton sits at the intersection of I-81 and I-64 - the north-south backbone of the Shenandoah Valley and the east-west route across the Blue Ridge. Amtrak's Cardinal route, running three times a week between New York and Chicago, stops downtown - a rare amenity for a city this size. Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport is in Weyers Cave, about ten miles north; Charlottesville-Albemarle is an hour east. Inside the downtown, walking is the answer. The trolley fills in. The DeJarnette Sanitarium - a sister institution to Western State Hospital and a difficult piece of the city's history - sits abandoned on a hill visible from Richmond Avenue, a reminder that not all of Staunton's history is comfortable.

The Victorian Festival fills downtown the last full weekend of April, with parades, music, and costumes that take the city's architectural inheritance and make a party of it. Gypsy Hill Park, in the center of town, hosts free outdoor concerts most summer nights - the Stonewall Brigade Band on Mondays, bluegrass on Wednesdays, jazz on Thursdays. The American Shakespeare Center runs an eight-to-nine-show season. Beyond the city limits, the choices multiply: the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park ($30 per car) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (free) both run a short drive away. Grand Caverns - America's oldest commercial show cave - is twenty minutes northeast. Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, is forty-five minutes east. You can be in Charlottesville in an hour, in Washington in three. Most weekends, Staunton finds enough to do on its own.