Romania // Bucharest //  Piata Revolutiei  Most inner-city
sights are within walking distance of Calea Victoriei, an avenue
of vivid contrasts, scattered with vestiges of ancien régime
elegance interspersed with apartment blocks, glass and steel
facades and cake shops. Fulcrum of the avenue is Piața
Revoluției, created during the 1930s on Carol II’s orders to
ensure a field of fire around the Royal Palace.  On the north
side of the square is the Athénée Palace Hotel (now a Hilton),
famous for its role as an “intelligence factory” from the 1930s
until the 1980s, with its bugged rooms, tapped phones and
informer prostitutes. To its east are the grand Romanian
Atheneum, the city’s main concert hall, and the University
Library, torched, allegedly by the Securitate, in the confusion
of the 1989 revolution, but since rebuilt and reopened.  To the
southeast of the square is the former Communist Party HQ, now
the Senate, where Nicolae Ceauşescu made his last speech from a
low balcony on December 21. His speech drowne