Manchester was the world’s first industrial town, the cradle of the global manufacturing economy. Today‘s Manchester, however, is no museum: busy and forward-looking, it seems prouder of its soccer clubs and its modern-day prosperity – a rare thing in Britain’s troubled north – than of any past glories. There is little in the streets of…
Granted: nobody would mistake the Alpes Maritimes for the Himalaya. After all, the mountains which line the coast of the French and Italian Riviera are easily measured in the hundreds of metres rather than the thousands. They can, however, look intimidatingly high when seen from the ground up. When you stand by the sea –…
Genoa is a city with many faces: you know that already since we told you that in our last post. Still, I defy anybody turning the corner behind the church of Sant’Antonio on Genoa’s Corso Italia not to be surprised. Boccadasse is a Cinque Terre idyll, neatly stacked boxes of pinks and bright yellows, transported…
The great thing about Genoa is that it keeps on giving. No matter how many times you have visited, there is always something new to discover. In the Old Town, you never know what you will find when you turn the next corner in its dark and narrow maze: there is the multicultural mix of the…
If you are looking for a short walk to round off your trip to Trieste that is not too long or too challenging, something that will not take more than a total of 3 hours out of your schedule – we recommend the eclectic Miramare Gardens. These gardens were laid out in the north of Trieste…
No country in the world is entirely made of one piece: wherever you go, you will always find differences between individual regions. It is equally clear, however, that some countries are more homogeneous than others, and I have always found that the band of cultural variety is particularly narrow in Italy. There is a certain…
Whatever anyone will tell you, Rainer Maria Rilke is the greatest poet in the German language. If you do not speak German well enough to read Rilke in the original (or if you think, with Mark Twain, that life is too short to learn it), try – for flavour – a painting of Rilke’s near-contemporary…
There are many more walks in the Lower Rhine Plains between Krefeld and the Dutch-German border other than the two that we introduced here over the past two weeks. The European Long Distance Trail GR8, for example, will take you from Nijmegen to Kalkar or Xanten and beyond, while an extensive network of picturesque foot…
Last week, we enjoyed the baroque splendour of the landscaped gardens around the Prinz Moritz trail. Today, we stay in the same area and (roughly) the same period of German history, moving only a few kilometres up the Lower Rhine Valley and a few decades down the line to the time of the friendship between…
Germany is Europe’s premier hiking country: nowhere else on the “old continent” will you be able to find a similarly large number and variety of well-designed and diligently maintained trails. Few hikers outside of Germany, however, will be able to name a trail that does not run either through the Black Forest or along the…