Western Pennsylvania

The Alleghenies form the forested, stony spine of Pennsylvania, and amid the hollows and rushing streams are sylvan glades so ideally beautiful that Frank Lloyd Wright once built his most famous house here (not that he ever lived in it). For all that natural beauty, this is largely rust-belt country, a land peppered with steel towns that have fallen on hard times. But the biggest town of them all – Pittsburgh – has managed to reverse the rot of economic depression and synthesize the area's scrappy mountain spirit with an embrace of diversity and oddball aesthetics.