easy hiking trails in Europe
La Spezia is that rare kind of thing: a tourist town without tourist attractions. The town is full of visitors who have travelled there halfway across Europe – some of them halfway across the world – not to visit and experience La Spezia but to use the town as a base for explorations of the…
… domes of foliage from which burst forth a polyphony of lemons and oranges and the ephemeral veil of a foam,of a sea powder that no human foot has ever touched or seems about to, but unfortunately the train accelerates …Towards Tellaro by Eugenio Montale There are about 350 members in the federation of the Borghi Piu Belli d’Italia…
In the afternoon of 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and heir apparent to a baronetcy that came with a large fortune, rigged his sailing boat in the port of Livorno to return from a meeting with friends to his home further up the Italian coast in the bay of La Spezia. Ahead of…
I have always held that every town, no matter how frumpy and dull it may appear, can give you one day of good entertainment. After that, the metropolitan wheat is divided from the Palookaville chaff, but for a single day, day trippers should not struggle too hard to find what they are looking for: a…
Some countries do city tourism well, others badly or not at all. At one end of the scale, you have France, Spain and Italy. Their great cities are firm fixtures on the global tourism itinerary, and most of these countries’ regional capitals have become popular destinations in their own right. Toulouse and Strasbourg, Seville and…
Visitors who come to the UK from abroad may think that all of modern London has been cast from the same expensive mould: and up to a point, they would be right. In the centre of London, it is rare indeed to find even a small flat for under one million pounds, while houses fetch…
Italian cities share a family likeness that is – like all family likenesses – easier to recognise than to define. Is it the colours (above all, the blend of rich yellows), the delicately balanced proportions, the trompe l’oeil effects, the distinctly classical architectural features? It is probably a little bit from all of that. No…
Every major city in the world has iconic street furniture – Paris has the riverbank boxes of the bouqinistes, Berlin its Litfasssäule advertising columns, Venice the splashback pissotte that are designed to prevent men from urinating in street corners – … … but no city in the world is as blessed in this respect as…
There are enough hiking trails on the eastern side of Lake Como to keep you busy for more than a week. The most popular of the lot is probably the Sentiero del Viandante, a 70-km-long lakeside trail between Lecco and Morbegno at the foot of the Alps. On our first day at the lake, I…
There are many reasons to visit Italy, but here is the most important one: it is the one destination in Europe that is reliably beautiful. Other countries have beauty spots on what is otherwise a coat of many colours, some of which may be rather grey and unbecoming, but in Italy, no matter where you…