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If you’re in the mood for some nightlife, wander around Bardstown Rd and Baxter Ave for a place that suits your taste - you can find anything from yuppie-friendly wine bars to sports dives popular with University of Louisville undergrads (go Cardinals!). If you’re feeling morbid, you could stroll past gothic Cave Hill Cemetery on Baxter Ave, final resting place of Colonel Harland Sanders of “finger lickin’ good” KFC fame (of course you could actually tour the cemetery during the day, if you want, but is that really as much fun as peering through the gate in the dark?).

Bed down on Italian linens at the ultra-slick 21c Museum Hotel. This mod downtown space is part hotel, part cutting edge art gallery run by the International Contemporary Art Foundation. Expect serious luxury, from flat screen TV to room-service bison burgers from the acclaimed hotel restaurant, Proof.

You wouldn’t go to Paris without visiting the Eiffel Tower, and you wouldn’t go to Louisville without checking out the white spires of Churchill Downs. Three miles south of downtown, this most famous of all horseracing tracks is home to the “greatest two minutes in sports,” the Kentucky Derby. Unless you’ve reserved seats for the May event years in advance (or you’re the Queen of England; Elizabeth II was trackside in 2007) you’re probably out of luck, but for $40 you can drink a mint julep with your face smushed into someone’s sweaty back in the mobbed Paddock area. It’s worth it though, just to see the outrageous hats traditionally worn by derby-goers - everything from umbrella-sized floral confections to scale models of Churchill Downs itself. The two-week Kentucky Derby Festival, which culminates in the race itself, includes a hot air balloon race and a massive fireworks display. But even if you’re not in town around Derby time you can still get a $3 seat at the Downs from April to November to watch warm-up races or simulcasts from other tracks. Or you can check out the Kentucky Derby Museum by Gate 1, with displays on race history, an exhibit of winners of the annual hat contest and a behind-the-scenes track tour.

Drive through the blue-collar Germantown and Schnitzelburg neighborhoods, where descendants of German immigrants have been drinking lager, playing dainty (a local version of street stickball) and going to potlucks at the German-American club for generations. Want to be sure to catch a game of dainty? The Schnitzelburg World Dainty Championship is held front of Hauck’s Handy Store each July.

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Sixty-five Trappist monks live lives of silence and prayer at the Abbey of Gethsemani, an austerely beautiful monastery, 50 miles south of Louisville. Built in the mid-1800s, the monastery was the longtime home of Thomas Merton, famous for his writings on non-violence and his interest in Eastern spirituality. Both Catholic and non-Catholic visitors come for popular silent retreats, wandering the abbey’s vast wooded property; day visitors may attend Mass. The monks sell their fruitcake, cheese and fudge at the on-site gift shop.

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For lunch, you’ve got to try Louisville’s culinary claim to fame, the rather unappetizingly named Hot Brown. An open-faced turkey-and-bacon sandwich slathered in Mornay sauce and broiled, the Hot Brown was supposedly invented to feed hungry flappers after a Roaring Twenties dinner dance at downtown Louisville’s Brown Hotel. The hotel’s J Graham’s Cafe features a classic version. Poking around the Brown’s majestic lobby is worth a few minutes as well. Massive chandeliers hang from the vaulted ceiling and theatrically large potted ferns spill over the grand piano, recalling the hotel’s glory days of the 1920s and ’30s, when opera singer Lily Pons allowed her pet lion to roam free in her suite, and early film star Al Jolson got in a fight in the downstairs restaurant.

Just south of downtown, Old Louisville is America’s largest Victorian neighborhood. Stroll down 3rd St, once known as Millionaire’s Row, where well-heeled fin de siècle Louisville citizens built their turreted