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…
Lou Camin Nissart is the first of its kind in France: a Grande Randonnée, a top-category hiking trail, that goes around a town in a loop, similar to what the périphérique ring road does in Paris, only for hikers. And with far more pretty views, since the town in question is Nice, the scenic capital…
Taranto is not one of Italy’s Instagram destinations. There are no grand piazzas lined by statues from Michelangelo and other artists whose names you may remember from high school, no scenic inland waterways that break up the sunlight into thousand shards of sparkle. Taranto’s beauty is of a different order – and, on top of…
For many years, Lecce was the only major tourist destination in the entire mezzogiorno, the bottom of the Italian boot south of Naples. The town likes to style itself as the “Florence of the South” and can bolster this claim with some great architecture from different periods … … but particularly with its richly decorated…
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…