The island of Capri – just off the Italian coast near the southern city of Naples – is a truly dazzling spectacle. You could be forgiven for thinking that a theme park operator had carefully assembled all the familiar Mediterranean motives – azure skies and the turquoise sea, rocks, trees, hills, a marina, caves –…
There is, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, a time and a season for everything: a season for exhausting hikes through mountainous territory (spring, let’s say), a season for coastal walks with swimming wear in the backpack (that would be summer, of course), and a season for themed town walks in two halves with a…
I have always found, going (a long way) back to the time when I was a child, that the week between Christmas and 1 January had something magical about it: the old year is clearly over – newspapers and TV schedules are full with reviews and “this was the year that was” analyses – while…
We continue with our tips on how to get most out of your short trip to Nice In contrast to the mountainside, the Riviera’s other great area of wilderness, the Mediterranean Sea does not require its prospective visitors to embark on a long and protracted journey: it is always there, at most a few hundred…
Holidays would be different if we had unlimited amounts of time for them, but we do not. So they are what they are, which largely means: always too short. As a rule of thumb, the more affluent people are, the more often they will go on a vacation, but – since the time available for…
The architecture of fascism is everywhere in Italy. If you have ever visited the country and are fascinated by fascist architecture, chances are you will have seen loads of it – unknowingly, perhaps, because these buildings blend in well with the rest of Italy’s street furniture, baroque churches and Renaissance palazzi included. The architecture of Italian…
I don’t know about you, but whenever we come across a town that has been labeled a City of the Arts, I get a queasy feeling in my stomach. From experience I know that all too often, this means grim medieval palazzi and stuffy churches that have been packed with dark, baffling and impenetrable paintings…
Today, we will start our second set of walks in Emilia-Romagna. In contrast to the first group of hikes that we posted a few weeks ago – which were full day trips – the shorter walks from this second group require less of a commitment and take a much smaller chunk out of your holiday…
In our previous London spy walk on the trail of the Cambridge Five, we left off with Maclean and Burgess just about making it to Southampton for the day’s last ferry to France, never to return to the UK. The sudden disappearance of two middle-ranking foreign service officials, at least one of whom was under acute suspicion…
London may not be the world’s most beautiful city but it is probably its most storied. Almost every street corner has a story to tell: about rock music, Charles Dickens, Jack the Ripper and so on – the list of themes is virtually endless. London is also the capital of spy stories, and the most…