Our trip to Tallinn was short and semi-sweet: we arrived together, Art stayed 2 hours and left for Stockholm and I stayed the night in a hostel and left the next day. Tallinn is beautiful certainly. It is a perfectly preserved walled medieval town, narrow cobblestoned streets lined with fine old buildings. There is, of course, a town square dominated by a 15th century town hall, baroque churches, ramparts and lookouts on the walls, lovely flower market and tiny alleyways leading to courtyards with lovely cafes.
But disappointingly for us and perhaps because we were there for only a short time, Tallinn old town seemed like Disneyland’s version of an old medieval town, complete with hawkers in medieval costume offering tours of prisons and torture chambers. Outside the walls, the Tallinn of today is modern and uninspiring, jarring with the seemingly artificially picturesque old town within the walls. Again please take our review of Tallinn with a grain of salt because we were certainly in a weird place at the time (see next posting describing how we discovered we needed to leave Europe post-haste) but if one wants a really great experience in only one medieval town in Europe, we would say avoid Tallinn in favour of, say Bruges, Belgium (seen on a previous trip), which in our opinion is fantastic (and real).
Bellissimo Travels 