As the great gateway to the South, Atlanta has come along way since its humble origins as a railroad depot. Razed to the ground during General Sherman's "March to the Sea" in 1864, Atlanta is a spangled metropolis on the southern horizon. It’s the city of Scarlett O’Hara, Coca Cola, from where Martin Luther King Jr unleashed his social revolution, and the world headquarters for CNN,  where Ted Turner first revolutionised cable news.

If you’re a Gone With the Wind enthusiast,  visiting Atlanta for the first time, you might be disappointed to discover that Scarlett O'Hara's cherished plantation house, Tara, was as fictitious as Scarlett herself.  However, history buffs will find atmospheric antebellum treasures in nearby towns, including Clayton County where the storyline was set.  Atlanta does give a very big damn about Gone with the Wind – and you can explore the museums, southern homes and hotels that are connected to Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the film, which celebrated its 75th birthday last year.

Thanks to its central location in Peachtree Street, the Margaret Mitchell House is a prime port of call, which is now repurposed as a museum including the apartment where Mitchell wrote most of her novel. Housed in a Tudor-revival building she nicknamed “The Dump, the apartment's two small rooms, galley kitchen and bathroom are period styled to the 1930s. Join one of the half-hourly guided tours, which talks you through her formative years and how she bluffed her way into journalism.  To delve deeper into the epic story, a 30-minute drive north-west of Atlanta brings you to the Gone With the Wind Museum on historic Marietta Square. The museum, housed in an old warehouse, showcases a wealth of memorabilia including Scarlett's honeymoon gown and original promotional material for the film.

When in town in for the 1939 premiere of Gone With The Wind, Clark Gable visited the Cyclorama, a 360-degree panorama depicting the Battle of Atlanta, located in the Civil War Museum. Completed in 1886, it’s considered as the world's largest oil painting. (42 feet high and 358 feet long.) Gable famously remarked that the only way the painting could be improved was if he was in it.  And, apparently, his face was indeed added to one of the figures in the foreground, in the 3D diorama that was added to the painting. See if you can spot it!

In 1949, Margaret Mitchell was tragically killed by a speeding car on Peachtree Street, as she headed to the movies with her husband, John Marsh. She was buried at Oakland Cemetery, just south of the Civil War Museum, an atmospheric  oasis at the city’s highest point. The cemetery also contains over 6,900 Confederate graves from the civil war and a separate African-American section, stemming from the slavery and segregation era.

As a hard-core news junkie, the landmark CNN Center was  an essential stop, where I joined a 50-minute guided walking tour to get some behind-the-scenes glimpses at the high-tech world of this global news network. The tour starts by ascending a staggering eight-storey escalator – recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest freestanding escalator in the world, which zips you up into a theatre, re-creating CNN's main control room for a flavour of the complexities of producing a a live news broadcast, with multiple feeds.

I enjoyed getting a birds-eye view over the main newsroom, plus the main news studios. But don’t expect to run into the likes of Anderson Cooper – all of CNN’s prime-time stars are now based in New York and DC.  Flanking the CNN Center, Centennial Park, an expansive swathe of green, was a central venue for the 1996 Olympic Games. The Fountain of Rings burst into life throughout the day with a water and music spectacle— and there’s numerous art works honouring the Olympic host city.

Atlanta’s is also of course home to the World of Coca Cola, an extra-effervescent exposition from the soft drink company. If it sounds like a colossal Coke commercial - it is, but it’s also a blockbuster Atlanta attraction. Housing a mammoth collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia, there are numerous interactive displays tracing the company’s history from its pioneering days in 1886 when Dr. Pemberton invented the drink, high-tech exhibits and even an art gallery.

The stand-outs for me were admiring the antique Coke artifacts, like the 1905 “Drink Coca-Cola" Christmas bell decoration and the vintage Coke delivery truck from Argentina. You’ll see the purpose-built vault where the secret formula is held, since it was shifted to the facility from SunTrust Bank in 2011, to celebrate the Coke’s 125th anniversary. But the undeniable highlight is the Taste It sampling station, where you can sip you way around the world, sampling over 60 different soft drink products, owned by Coca Cola.

Some of the Latin American fizzy brands are lip-smackers, and I particularly adored Beverly, an Italian-only soda drink. After being ridiculously refreshed by the soda overdose, take the time to honour Atlanta’s famous son, Martin Luther King Jr in the Sweet Auburn neighbourhood.

See his birth home and the Gothic-Revival Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual centre of the civil rights movement from 1960 to 1968, where he served as a pastor, alongside his father.  Finally, his resting place, a white marble tomb with the inscription,"Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last.”

TOP TIPS

If you’re travelling with kids, two other celebrated Atlanta attractions are the Georgia Aquarium ( the world’s biggest) and Legoland Discovery Center.  The official tourism site is a useful guide. www.atlanta.net

Atlanta will soon be a lot easier to access, with Air New Zealand launching direct flights in December, between Auckland and Houston, gateway to the American South. Head to www.airnewzealand.co.nz