Sanaa was old when Rome was young: Sabaean stelae, Rasulid stucco, Ottoman barracks and the Imams' rock palace all stand within a few kilometres. These three days follow that sequence, from the city walls out to Wadi Dhahr and Bayt Baws.
The last of Sanaa's original gates, rebuilt in 1870 under Ottoman rule on far older foundations. The mudbrick rampart beside it is the surviving stretch of a wall that once ran roughly 5 km around the whole city.
The hilltop fortress on the old city's eastern edge, held in turn by Himyarite lords, Ottoman garrisons and the Zaydi Imams, who used it as arsenal and prison. Its foundations are the oldest defensive stonework in Sanaa.
A 16th-century samsarah where copper merchants stabled camels in the ground-floor arcade and slept in the galleries above. Restored under the Sanaa preservation programme, it now holds metal and silver workshops around the courtyard.
Raised in the 14th century under Rasulid rule and named for a court eunuch who endowed it, this small mosque holds Sanaa's finest carved stucco mihrab and a minaret banded in alternating brick and white gypsum.
Set in Dar al-Shukr, the palace Imam Yahya built in the 1930s, its floors run from Sabaean alabaster funerary heads and Awwam temple finds to the Imamate's own furnishings. Parts of the collection were damaged after 2015.
Ottoman governor Hasan Pasha built this domed mosque in 1597, during the first Turkish occupation of Yemen. It is the one building in Sanaa raised in true Istanbul style, with a lead-grey central dome instead of the flat Yemeni roof.
The former Ottoman barracks holds arms, uniforms and staff cars from the 1962 revolution that ended a thousand years of Zaydi Imamate rule, plus material from the 1960s civil war and the 1994 north-south conflict.
The suburb Ottomans and later Imams laid out west of the walls from the 17th century: whitewashed villas, walled bustan gardens and the Mutawakkil mosque, built low and wide where the walled city built tall and dense.
Imam Yahya's five-storey summer palace, completed in the 1930s on an 18th-century base atop a sandstone pillar occupied since pre-Islamic times. Cisterns, majlis rooms and a rock-cut well shaft run down through the stack.
A fortified village on a rock outcrop 8 km south, Himyarite in origin and home to a Jewish community until it left for Israel in 1949-50. Stone houses, cisterns and Sabaean inscriptions cut into doorposts still stand among the ruins.
The Jewish quarter where thousands of Yemeni Jews lived under a rule capping their houses at two storeys, well below their neighbours. The synagogues are gone, but the low white terraces and narrow lanes still read as a separate town.
The Sailah is the paved flood course cut through the old city, dry ten months a year and used for centuries as the main north-south road. Follow it up to Bab Shu'ub, the gate that opened to the tribal highlands.