Many people come to Brindisi, but few stay for longer than it takes to hop on to a ferry or a train. Brindisi is not a destination but a hub: tourists who are flying in to visit the heel of the Italian boot often take a bus to their holiday destination directly from Brindisi airport…
Genoa is full of surprises – even for routine visitors like us. Although we have come often over the years – we love Genoa’s “big city feel” that no other place near us can match – we still discover new things every time we visit. Most recently, strangely enough, we saw for the first time…
Having familiarised ourselves with the style and the atmosphere of the bourgeois 8th arrondissement of Paris (the neighbourhood around the Champs Elysees), we are now ready to explore the other quartier that plays a key role in Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time: the Faubourg St Germain, the part of Paris where, in the…
Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time is a big book in every sense of the phrase. In 7 volumes and a total of more than 1.2 million words, it deals with a lot of large topics: memory, social and political upheaval, love and death. On top of that, it features a large cast of…
The southern German spa town of Baden-Baden has been attracting visitors since the dawn of the tourism age in the 19th century. It is renowned for its beauty … … as well as for its historic sites that include the elegant casino where the Russian writer Dostoevsky conducted intensive research for his novella The Gambler…
When you visit a city for the first time and are not quite sure what you want to see, it is always a good idea to start with the unusual, the distinctive and – if possible – the unique. Our last post about Lyon, for example, concentrated on the Traboules (underground passages between buildings) and…
The main attraction of Varese is, without a doubt, the Sacro Monte del Rosario. This is not to say that there is nothing else worthy of your attention in this handsome northern Italian town. Varese has a colourful city centre … … that has developed around the town’s historic core of medieval cathedral and baptistry…
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….
Having explored Lake Como and Lake Lugano on the first few days of our trip to northwestern Lombardy, we had a distinct appetite for something completely different. Which is why, on the last day of our stay, we decided to go Into The Woods … … not anticipating that, in the end, we would get…
It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in my house it is) that every holiday break of more than three days must be spiced up with a bit of variety. More specifically, such longer holiday breaks should include two things: first, one day trip where you do something totally different from what you are…