Ready to meet more of London’s undead? Good, they have been dying to meet you – in some cases waiting for you for hundreds of years in the haunted City of London. Brave enough for the Haunted City of London? We start the second part of our walk on Trafalgar Square, right underneath Nelson’s Column….
Some people travel to England to learn English, to do business, to watch a West End play or a football game. Others travel to Britain to meet a ghost. Don’t laugh: this is big business. Owners of castles try to lure overseas visitors with a promise of a meeting with their dead ancestors, stately homes…
The capital of the French Riviera was the great love in the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists The list of famous painters who have been claimed as the genius loci of one Riviera town or the other is long: Cagnes-sur-Mer has Renoir, St Paul de Vence has Chagall, Menton has Jean…
With a trip to the Jardin Exotique, you always win Monaco mainly consists of concrete, and the few green spaces that you come across when exploring the streets of the principality all have an air of unrealness about them – as though the trees would all go up in a puff of smoke if you…
Walks on the Riviera coast work best when they combine colour and contrast The French and the Italian sides of the Riviera, while having much in common, also reflect many characteristics of the very different countries to which they are attached. The French Riviera, for example, is better “organized” and more clearly structured into individual…
Hitler, Stalin, Kaiser Bill: see them all on a walk along the Berlin Wall Trail Some of the world’s greatest cities are defined by a single building: Paris, for example, by the sleek elegance of the Eiffel Tower, Sydney by the brashness and sheer daring of its Opera House. And then there is Berlin, a…
In the footsteps of the impressionist master at the Riviera resort of Bordighera, follow the Monet. The French painter Claude Monet spent one winter – the early part of 1884 – in the Italian town of Bordighera, having been introduced to this part of the Riviera by his friend Renoir the year before. Monet was…
Athens does not do many things, but what it does, it does very, very well The great tourist attractions of the world can be divided into two groups, the foxes and the hedgehogs, representing either destinations that do many things reasonably well or destinations that do only one thing but have mastered this to the…
Urban Walks in the South of France Walk to the villa where W B Yeats died In general, I don’t believe in the theory that you can acquire an understanding of literature through a process of natural osmosis in the places where it was once written – in other words that you can replace, for…
Urban walks in the South of France A walk through Little Africa in the Riviera One of the things I have been wondering about ever since we started to come regularly to the Riviera is: where did the Petit Afrique area in Beaulieu-sur-Mer get its name from? On one of our recent hikes, we had the…
