Sure, there are banks all over the place. Two-hundred-and-something grim palaces to mammon plus over 100 insurance companies, ranged shoulder to corporate shoulder along highways studded with Porsches and Mercs. And that high-rise EU building that pops up on the evening news is there, too, startling in its brutishness. But the television pictures are distorting. There is another Luxembourg - a tiny, handsome city in a pretty little country. With new direct flights from Dublin, it's now within easy reach.
Everything about Luxembourg is small, except for the average income ($43,000: the highest in the world) and the average size of food servings (gargantuan). A 10-minute hop from the Tom Thumb airport and you are in the city centre. In 20 minutes and you can be in Germany to the east, France to the south or Belgium to the west. It's a miniature land, a multilingual state which fuses into its own distinctive mixture French architecture and flaky croissants, German efficiency and wine styles, Flemish-accented English with a Belgian fondness for mussels and frites. Luxembourgish, the native language, sounds like a mixture of German and Dutch - yet French is what you'll most likely be addressed in. 50,000 Portuguese and 20,000 Italians add more flavours to a cosmopolitan stew that also has Pygmalion, an Irish pub, just around the corner from its English cousin Britannia. If the whole place weren't so utterly manageable, so easy to get around, it would make you blink with disorientation.
But you can't get lost - at least not in the city, perched high on its plateau between the deep canyons of two rivers. "Just don't cross any bridges and you'll be fine," our guide warned, leaving us free to explore the old part of a town that was once such an impregnable fortress, atop a massive, craggy rock, that it was known as the Gibraltar of the North. Given the full treatment by Vauban, the French expert in fortifications, it was a model bastion, complete with ring walls, ramparts and underground galleries, in the 17th century. By the end of the 19th century, its military defences had been largely dismantled, but you still get the flavour strolling round the Corniche that hugs the old citadel.
You can explore the core of this pint-sized capital in a morning - even a late-breakfast holiday morning. Narrow, cobbled streets with names like Breedewee - Broadway - conjure up its medieval past, while the Palace of the Grand Duke right in the middle of town is a fine reminder of the Renaissance. The golden sandstone facade of this magnificent building, complete with Moorish reliefs and fancy iron balconies, dates from the period when Luxembourg was under the flag of the Spanish Netherlands.
But my favourite place in the old quarter is brand-new. The Museum of History is architecturally exciting - a breathtaking modern building rising through six floors to link the rough bedrock of the city's foundations with a group of town houses constructed in the past three centuries. You glide between these layers of the past in the biggest lift in Europe: a mobile, glass-walled room. Don't miss the historical models of the town at different stages in its evolution, exquisitely carved in maple to match the floors.
After this blast of history, there's still time to swan around the swanky shops of the pedestrianised Grand'Rue and its tributaries, most of which suggest that Luxembourg and luxury are as indivisible as the bankers you'd been trying to forget and their quietly expensive suits. All the big international names are here, from Cartier to MaxMara, but there is also one peerless Luxemburgish institution. Villeroy & Boch, makers of fine porcelain since 1767, have a gleaming city-centre showcase (as well as a factory outlet some distance out of town). A whole shop full of V&B china, glass and cutlery: credit card meltdown threatens.
Even if you don't buy any gorgeous dinner plates to take home, you can enjoy eating off them, in strikingly modest restaurants. Take the Hotel de la Gare in Diekirch, a riverside town half an hour's drive north of Luxemburg city. A simple but utterly terrific lunch of local Ardennes ham and frisee salad in a diningroom without pretension is served on Luxembourg's most famous tableware. So generous is the hand of the chef that you are likely to remember, for all the wrong reasons, that this town suffered badly in the Battle of the Bulge.
A short distance further north, through countryside of pasture and dappled woodland, is Vianden, the home of the Grand Duchy's most popular tourist attraction. It is a fairytale castle, perched high on the hill above a neat little town that Victor Hugo used to love visiting - an extraordinary amalgamation, in a single building, of gothic, Romanesque and Renaissance elements, with even a dash of Byzantine thrown in. Mercifully for 20th-century leg muscles, it's accessible by cable-car.
Echternach, another town close to the German border, also draws thousands of pilgrims - real ones, in the religious sense, as well as meandering tourists. Its centrepiece is the enormous abbey founded in the 7th century by St Willibrord, a missionary from Northumbria who apparently had Irish roots. Every Whit Tuesday, some 13,000 Catholics take part in a religious procession which involves hopping slowly forward, from foot to foot, in time to music. Participants link together by holding the ends of handkerchiefs, "so they can avoid each other's sweaty hands," explained the priest who was our guide. The good saint, who lies entombed in marble splendour in the crypt, can no doubt make sense of it all.
To the south, the Moselle river which forms the remainder of Luxembourg's border with Germany also flanks the country's Wine Road. Vineyards stretching up the hillsides produce an abundance of white wine, both still and sparkling, with not-too-expensive Riesling, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris the main attractions. Dotted with country inns, the Wine Road - also only 20 minutes out of town - is where Luxembourg's city slickers go for fresh air and Sunday lunch. That's the only day in the week when you can't nip back for the additional indulgence of coffee and cakes at Oberweis temple of patisserie in the Grand'Rue. Save it for another time, and you'll be brought smartly back atisserie. to the Luxembourg you started with - the one that's all about money. Buy a box of chocolate Euros to bring home.