If we have whetted your appetite with our last two posts, you may be wondering: what is the best way for yourself to explore the villages of Provence? When you are looking for answers on the Internet, you can easily get the impression that the public transport infrastructure of the area will not be very…
Over the years, we have travelled extensively on the various van Gogh trails in France, driven purely by the power of circumstance. When we lived in Paris, the artist was practically our neighbour, separated from us by no more than a couple of blocks and 120 years. Way back then, we also followed van Gogh’s…
You may have never heard the name before, but Görlitz in the extreme south-eastern corner of Germany is a serious contender for the crown of the country’s Most Beautiful Town. In a part of Europe that has been devastated by violent conflicts time and again over the centuries, Görlitz has managed to survive the horrors…
The Holocaust was the crime of the 20th century, but even within this bloodstained frame, the extinction of Poland’s and Warsaw’s Jews stands out for its exceptional cruelty: these people – who had done nobody any harm – were imprisoned, starved and told lies about their future while the infrastructure for their murder was being…
There are few cities in Europe that look as new as Warsaw. There are few cities in Europe that are as new as Warsaw. The Polish capital may look back on one thousand years of history, but you would be hard-pressed to find a building in town that was not built (or entirely rebuilt) after…
This week, we feature a guest post from our friend and fellow Riviera-resident Vaud Massarsky who used to work as a serial entrepreneur in the USA (where he, among other businesses, published a weekly New York City real estate journal and produced live drama as well as musicals) and now spends much of his time…
Today, we will offer you ideas of how to engineer a perfect three-day discovery trip to an unfamiliar destination. For starters, make sure that the three days are really three different days, not the same day played on repeat. One way of doing this is to assign different types of sightseeing activities to each of…
The town of Alba in Piemonte, approx. 50 km south of Turin, is beautiful in a way that Italian towns appear to have patented for themselves. It has a beautiful central piazza, … … and, to counterbalance the weight of 2000 years of history, a more busy and modern town square (between Via Roma and…
Most people who visit Naples for the first time put a day trip to Pompeii near the top of their agenda. We, however, did not. Our recent trip to Naples was our fourth – we still had not seen the ruins – and I finally surrendered, much in the spirit of a man who hates…
The concept of a journey implies that with every step of the way, the world changes in some aspect and also that something changes in us. (Italo Calvino) There is no Italian town without tourists. You only have the choice between different degrees of crowdedness: some towns at the extreme end of the spectrum function…