Hikes in Piedmont
No account of Orta would be complete without a piece on its most eye-catching feature: the island of San Giulio that sits a few hundred meters away from the town in the middle of the lake, mounted like a precious stone on a shimmering expanse of blue. Generally speaking, it is a good idea to…
Knights, peasants and mendicant friars who, 1000 years ago, journeyed throughout Europe in search of a direct encounter with God have written one of the most fascinating chapters of medieval history. The age of pilgrimages can be separated into three distinct periods: the earliest pilgrims sought out the shrines of saints in the hope that…
At first glance, the small lakeside town of Orta – located roughly 70 km north of Milan at the foot of the Italian Alps – comes across as a typical Instagram town: beautiful … … but perhaps a little too confident in the expectation that her many admirers will be so dazzled by her looks…
The Easy Hikers have been going on country hikes and urban walks in roughly even proportions for well over 10 years now, and I still cannot decide which of the two I would go for if I could pick only one. Simply stated, the problem is this: a good country hike beats a good urban…
Magnificent panoramas are woven into Turin’s cityscape like car factories and the river Po. Sometimes, you do not even have to leave the town center to enjoy these spectacular vistas … … but what you can see on any given day depends as much on the season (we took the picture above several years ago…
More than any other Italian city, Turin is a creature of modernity. For 200 years, it was the engine room of Italy’s intellectual, political and economic development of becoming a modern state: always ahead of its time, looking boldly into the future. But then, at the end of the 19th century, it suddenly decided to…
Italy was the birthplace of the tourism industry. For the 500 years since the invention of the “Grand Tour” by English aristocrats, foreign visitors have flocked to Italy in ever-increasing numbers to sing the praises of the country in any language and any medium at hand, from painting and poetry to TV programmes and Instagram….
The charms of Southern Piemonte – as we saw last week – may be rich and many, but a beautiful landscape is not one of them. Most of Southern Piemonte consists of flat, endless fields, so your best bet for a day trip is a town walk. The historically most interesting town in the area…
A few posts ago I told you what made Italy, for us, the perfect travel destination: that wherever you go, no matter how unfancy the place may seem, you will find something beautiful and interesting. Last week, we decided to put that to the test. The county of Southern Piemonte is one of Italy’s forgotten…
Travelling through Europe means crossing mountains and border lines, lines that have – for whatever reason – survived the medieval warlords who drew them in the sand centuries ago, but also rivers and mountains that, once almost insurmountable, have continued to divide tribes and nations for thousands of years. Borders such as the mountain range…