Be at the Citadel when it opens, which is usually around eight in the morning. It sits on Jabal al-Qal'a, the flat-topped hill directly above downtown, and there is almost no shade up there, which is the whole argument for going early. The Temple of Hercules gives you the two standing columns everyone photographs; behind it, the Umayyad palace complex with its reconstructed domed audience hall rewards more time than most visitors give it. There is a Byzantine church, a set of enormous cisterns, and the Jordan Archaeological Museum on site, which is small, densely packed and worth twenty focused minutes. Entry is around JD 3 if you are not carrying the pass. In summer the site stays open into the early evening; in winter it closes in the mid-afternoon, so a winter visitor should still go at opening rather than gamble on the afternoon.
From the Citadel, walk down. It takes about twenty minutes on foot to reach the Roman Theatre in the valley, and the descent is a good introduction to how this city is stacked. The theatre was cut into the hillside in the second century and seats roughly six thousand; it is still used for performances. Climb to the top row, which is steeper than it looks from the plaza. The ticket, around JD 2, also admits you to the Folklore Museum and the Museum of Popular Traditions housed in the two wings — costume, jewellery and mosaics, about fifteen minutes each. The smaller Odeon sits alongside.
Lunch is Hashem, a few minutes' walk into downtown, tucked into an alley off the main commercial street. It has been serving falafel, hummus, fuul and mint tea since the 1950s, the menu is essentially fixed, and a full plate with bread and tea comes to a few dinars a head. Follow it with kunafeh at Habibah, a standing counter down a nearby passage run by the same family since 1951; a plate is around a dinar and you eat it on your feet with everyone else.
Give the afternoon to al-Balad, the downtown quarter, on foot. Duke's Diwan is a 1924 stone house on the main downtown street, rescued from demolition in 2001 by Mamdouh Bisharat, known as the Duke of Mukheibeh, and kept open as a free and largely unrestored set of rooms upstairs. It takes fifteen minutes and it is a clear picture of what Amman looked like before the hills filled in. Walk through the gold and produce lanes without shopping seriously; the markets deserve their own morning and their own appetite.
Then cross to the Jordan Museum in Ras al-Ain, fifteen or twenty minutes west on foot or a very short ride. This is the collection that puts the rest of the country in order: the Ain Ghazal statues, which the museum dates to around 7500 BC and presents as among the earliest large-scale human figures ever made, and the Copper Scroll from Qumran. Allow ninety minutes. It closes on Tuesdays, and on Fridays it typically opens only for a short afternoon window.
Go back uphill for dinner. Sufra, on Rainbow Street in Jabal Amman, serves Jordanian home cooking in an old villa with a terraced garden; mansaf, the lamb and fermented yoghurt dish that is the national plate, generally has to be ordered ahead, and the place fills, so reserve. The alternative is the Wild Jordan Center, run by the national conservation society, whose terrace looks straight back across the valley at the hill you walked down that morning.
Day one is long. That is deliberate. It clears everything with a ticket and a closing time so that day two can be shapeless.
Start with breakfast at Shams el Balad near the First Circle, which grew out of a plant shop and cooks with local produce; it fills early at weekends. Then walk Rainbow Street outward from the First Circle. It is a street of 1920s and 1930s villas that has become the city's front room, and the pleasure of it is architectural rather than commercial. Books@cafe, in a 1920s villa just off it and open since 1997, has a bookshop downstairs and a terrace upstairs with the valley view.
If you want a hammam, this is the morning for it. Al-Pasha Turkish Bath in Jabal Amman is the long-established one; sessions are separated by gender and by time slot, booking ahead is expected, and a standard treatment with scrub and massage runs somewhere in the region of JD 30. It takes a couple of hours and you will not want to walk uphill afterwards, which is exactly why it belongs before lunch rather than after.
Amman's public staircases are infrastructure rather than decoration, and the flights that drop from the Jabal Amman ridge into al-Balad are a walk worth taking deliberately. Go down one in the middle of the day, have coffee in the valley, then take a taxi — not your legs — up to Jabal al-Weibdeh, which is a real climb.
Weibdeh is the older, quieter, more residential of the two hills, arranged around Paris Circle. Darat al Funun is the reason to come: three restored houses from the 1920s and 1930s stepped up a terraced garden, with the excavated remains of a sixth-century Byzantine church at the top of it, showing contemporary art from across the Arab world. Entry is free, it opens Saturday to Thursday and closes on Fridays, and it usually shuts for part of August, so check before you climb. The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts sits a short walk away in two buildings facing each other across a small park, with modern and contemporary work from the Arab and wider Muslim world and a modest entry fee.
Between the two, the neighbourhood's cafés are the point rather than the interval. Rumi Café is the busy one, with tall windows and a street view. Fann wa Chai is the quiet one, hung with art. Neither needs a plan.
For the evening, Beit Sitti runs a cook-and-eat class in a Weibdeh house: three sisters started it in 2010 to keep their grandmother's recipes in circulation, you cook the meal and then sit down to eat it, it needs booking well in advance, and the set price per person is usually somewhere around JD 40. If you would rather do nothing at all, Jafra downtown is an upstairs room off the main street with mezze, shisha and often live oud.
Pick a shape rather than a list. The first option is simply the slow version of day two: one hill, one long breakfast, one gallery, and the hammam or the cooking class you could not fit in.
The second is the outer edges. The Cave of the Seven Sleepers at al-Rajib, about ten kilometres southeast of the centre, is the site associated with the sleepers of the Qur'an and of Christian tradition; entry is free and the practical way there is a taxi with the driver waiting, which should come to something like JD 8 each way. The Royal Automobile Museum in King Hussein Park holds the late king's own cars and motorcycles and doubles as a run through modern Jordanian history. The two together make an easy half day with a car.
The third is the contemporary city, which most itineraries ignore. Abdali has been rebuilt as a boulevard of towers, offices and restaurants, and an afternoon there set against a morning in al-Balad says as much about where Amman is going as any museum does.
