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La Canicule: Even English-speaking Montrealers agree that it sounds hotter in French, the heat wave that drenches our libidinous city in sensuality. This summer, as Picasso Erotique - a not-for-prudes exhibition of 350 of the lusty Spaniard's censored works - makes its only North American appearance at the Musée des Beaux Arts, I'm wondering how Picasso would have painted this saucy ville francais that flaunts puckered red lips as its official tourist logo...

I imagine wild brush strokes - globs of carmine and black - for two svelte nocturnal dark-lidded tangueros (tango dancers) with pouty lips and zig-zag eyebrows, contorted in a torrid, traffic-stopping dawn abrazo on the Boulevard St. Laurent. Because in Montreal, despite all the ARRET traffic signs, you must display passion.

I imagine a canvas of Montreal's outdoor wrought-iron staircases spiralling like a surreal tornado through a methyl-blue sky, picking up bits of the hip Plateau Montreal in its path - to finally coverge on a huge firework-lit balcony laden with soufflés and farandoles and tapenades, and flowing with champagne and cloudberry liqueur and fiesty ales and lagers labeled with images of devils and flying canoes...and hundreds of lips and teeth kissing and eating and laughing. Because Montrealers love to hang outdoors and eat and drink and talk and kiss.

Ahh, but Picasso couldn't paint bi-lingual love...murmured in broken English and broken French...nor the odour of river-scented wind along the Lachine Canal. No, for this you must come here. En été.

Breakfast: As an ex-New Yorker who has enjoyed thousands of Gotham's fat and chewy bagels, I concur that the sweeter, thinner, crustier Montreal bagels are even better. You can grab them hot out of the wood-fired oven, at the Fairmount Bagel Bakery 24-hours a day, but you won't get a view of the Old Port to go with it. In this town of 4,900 restaurants, bistros and cafes, hundreds of atmospheric venues beckon you to café-au-lait. But on my Perfect Day, I head out on the Lachine Bicycle Path to Old Montreal and choose a café-terrace with Bordeaux red umbrellas on the wide Rue de la Commune for a front row seat on the Old Port .

Morning: Here we are with the lazy clop of horse-drawn caléches, seagulls on the wing, quais bulging with seaway lakers and luxury cruise ships, and three and a half centuries of history. Old photos in the McCord Museum archives show Montreal's Vieux Port thick with the masts of tall sailing ships. Now the flower sellers and portrait artists have taken over the Place Jacques-Cartier and soon tourists will descend upon the old cobbles and fan out in all directions. They will explore the Pointe-a-Calliére Museum of Archaeology and History, built over the city's first Catholic cemetery...and the new interactive science Centre iSci...and gape at the gilt ceilings in the Gothic Revival Notre Dame Basilica...and climb the 192 steps of the Merchant Marine Clock Tower to gaze down on toy ships and ants on rollerblades on the promenade below. And perhaps they'll brave a drenching jet boat ride over the treacherous Lachine Rapids, where poor old Louis Jolliet lost all his journals and maps of his 1673 Mississippi River expedition when his canoe overturned. And certainly these tourists will shop-shop-shop! for Amerindian dream-catchers and Inuit soapstone carvings along rue Saint Paul, and for unusual Quebec-made crafts and fashions in the silver-domed Marché Bonsecours.

There's so much to see and do in Old Montreal, but this morning I've come for the ambience and to gawk at The Magician's Garden with its amazing 30-foot tall creatures and creations sculpted from live foliage and flowers for Mosaicultures Internationales 2001. The Parc des Ecluses on the Lachine Canal is a green wonderland of leafy elephants, pandas, totem poles and Chinese dragons, and I am Alice. There are 100 works. It's a WOW of a show.

I'm heading west on the Lachine bicycle path. I won't cycle the full 12km to the Lac Saint Louise waterfront and the amazing outdoor sculpture museum, but to the Atwater Market to buy some picnic fixings. The 20-minute ride hugs the historic old Canal opened in 1825 to circumvent the dangerous rapids. It winds past abandoned grain towers with their ghostly, gritty beauty and factories converted into techno-chic lofts for artists and multi-media producers.

It's amazing how far you can go around Montreal and its archipelago on a bicycle. North America's premier cycling city has 250 miles of paths and the world's largest cycling event, the Tour de l'Ile. At the Maison des Cyclistes on the Rachel bike path at the corner of Brébeuf, where I pump up my tyres and caffeinate my body at the Café Bicicletta, you can pick up maps of all the city's bike paths.

Lunch: The Art Deco-inspired Atwater Market which opened in 1933 along the Lachine Canal has two outdoor promenades and 30 shops. In summer you can find it with your eyes closed. Bunches of fresh dill and tarragon, earthy leeks and pungent raw-milk cheeses - gooey camemberts and stinky goat fromages named after every saint in Quebec and banned in the U.S. Then there are the succulent grapes, slippery Kalamatas, voluptuous breads and patés and rich microbrewed beers whose labels recount the whole history and folklore of Quebec. Remembering my small knapsack and the 40-min cycle to the Montreal Botanical Garden, I restrain myself! I'll soon be picnicking with a friend among bonsais, penjings, bromeliads and birdsong.

Afternoon: Cycling east on Rachel through the Plateau Montreal, voted one of the hippest neighbourhoods in North America, I pass colorful boulangeries and creperies, confiseries, fruiteries and patisseries, and then am struck - always as if for the first time - by the bizarre silhouette of the world's tallest inclined tower. Montrealers budget-busting Olympic Stadium Tower has been the butt of public jokes - a disk-domed tower which looks like a mother ship from Orion. Its summit offers a panorama of the Monteregian hills and Adirondack Mountains, of the Botanical Garden's 180-acre kingdom of green below, and the quartier called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, once the "Shoe-making Capital of the World" and now prized for its Beaux Arts architectural treasures.

Where to spread our picnic? There are rose gardens, shade gardens, marsh and bog gardens, classical French gardens, the Dream Lake Garden - the largest Chinese garden outside Asia - and the Japanese Zen Garden of Silence. We choose grass and shade and dig into the Saint-André and Oka cheeses. Then we visit the brand new First Nations Garden, fragrant with potent herbs used by Quebec's native peoples: the Abenakis, Algonquins, Attikameks, Crees, Hurons-Wendats, Maliceets, Micmacs, Mohawks, Innu, Naskapis and Inuit. The garden commemorates the 300th birthday of The Great Peace treaty signed in Montreal on August 4, 1701 between 39 First Nations and France. You can't see the Botanical Garden's ten exhibition greenhouses and 30 themed gardens in one day. (Let alone all the wonders at the adjacent Biodome and Montreal Insectarium - where at a gala insect tasting, I squeamishly downed a fried scorpion, Mexican locust brochette and a mealworm pizza-and washed it all down with ant wine.) So that means more Botanical Garden picnics!

Evening: Although I could cycle over the Concorde Bridge to Ile-Notre-Dame, I doff my bike helmet and change into skimpy summer gown to meet my love at the glittering Casino de Montréal. Here we are going to splurge on the Menu Dégustation at the Casino's five-star Nuages and enjoy, through the restaurant's glass walls, the fabulous views of Montreal glimmering over the St. Lawrence. The sunset (with créme froide d'asperges) is awesome. The twinkling cityscape (red snapper with tapenade) is fabulous. The burst of sizzling fireworks over the Jacques Cartier Bridge (créme brulée a la vanille) is a conversation-stopper.

Now the question is, are we two tired tangueros, too tired to tango? I know a little milonga, I tell him, open till 3 a.m. La Tanguéria on Boulevard St. Laurent, where we can watch -maybe even try - some steps. It's only midnight. Montreal is just waking up - and Picasso érotique is dipping his brush.

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