Bari, the largest city on the Adriatic coast, is not a mandatory stop on the Great Italian Tourist Trail. No Renaissance masterpieces are on public display, the town’s history does not feature names that you would recognize from old High School lessons, and you will not see reflections of magnificent medieval architecture in the sparkling…
Why yearn for faraway countries when so much beauty is close at hand? I would love to say that we went to explore the Parc du Cap Martin on the French Riviera inspired by these famous words of Goethe, but the truth is far more prosaic: a friend had invited us for a drink in…
Today, we will be offering you: a lake that looks occasionally like a piece from the Amazon jungle … … a river that looks occasionally like a canal … … a gem of an old town with plenty of interesting views and motives … … and a spate of horses, largely in one shape and…
For many years, Aix-en-Provence had cornered the market for Picturesque Market Towns In Southern France. Easy-to-reach (just over an hour by train from Marseille) and pretty-to-look-at, it ticks all the important boxes for visitors. If you came from Northern Europe or North America and wanted to see a Typical Town In Provence, old men playing…
The past is a foreign country, as even people know who have not read “The Go-Between” (or seen the movie). But whereas the opening statement of L.P. Hartley’s novel refers to past habits and customs (“they do things differently there”), one can just as easily apply the phrase to the looks and the structures of…
There is a good chance that Prato is the largest Italian town that you have never heard of. It is the second largest city in Tuscany, larger than Pisa, Livorno and Siena, and also larger than any other city between there and Rome. On top of that, it is no industrial hell-hole (you may not…
Here is a strange thing: some neighbouring cities, although physically very close to each other, have a totally different look and feel. Take Nîmes and Arles, two close neighbours in the south of France. They share, inevitably, some characteristics, but it is the differences that stick out. Arles is the quintessential small town in Provence:…
For a man of his generation and relatively modest means, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh certainly got around a lot in Europe, spending time in Amsterdam and The Hague, Brussels, London and Paris. It is the south of France, however, which had the deepest impact on the artist’s soul and on his works. The…
To tell you the truth about our recent trip to Tuscany: Florence and the Easy Hikers did not quite hit it off this time. Florence, of course, will survive this, but so shall we. We had visited Florence before, many years ago, and still have pleasant memories from this trip. What has changed in the…
For a country with one of the longest coastlines in Europe, Italy – it has always seemed to me – has a surprisingly large number of large landlocked cities: Milan, Turin, Florence. Even Rome, strictly speaking, has no sea harbour (Ostia is more than 30 km away). What is the common secret of these places?…