easy hikes and city walks in Italy
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…
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…
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…
Turin has two sides, we told you last week, and if that was news to you, you may be as surprised to hear that this binary character is also reflected in the city’s topography. Two rivers are crossing Turin, one is wide and luminous, an integral part of the townscape – it passes Piazza Veneto…
If Rome is the heart of Italy and Naples the country’s soul, then Turin is its head. The capital of Italian coffee, cars and cocktails (the home of Lavazza, FIAT and Martini) is also the most rational and most transparently structured city in the land, a place so square that it is not only the…
Today, we will offer you ideas of how to engineer a perfect three-day discovery trip to an unfamiliar destination. For starters, make sure that the three days are really three different days, not the same day played on repeat. One way of doing this is to assign different types of sightseeing activities to each of…
Tourist Italy mainly consists of cities and towns. There are beaches and lakes, of course, but close your eyes and conjure up an image of an Italian tourist destination, and I bet that it will be the image of a historic town: Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples – urban destinations are also Italy’s Big Beasts…