Piacenza, says one of my guide books for Northern Italy, is known as the “City of Bricks”, but this, I believe, does not quite hit the mark. It is it true that many buildings in town, including some grand architectural statements of Church and State, have been constructed from that relatively humble material … ……
“Parma as a capital city needed a river”, said the Italian poet Artilio Bertolucci (the father of the internationally famous and Oscar-winning film director), “but since it is was only a small capital of an undistinguished Duchy, all it got was a torrente.” Torrenti are so unfamiliar in Northern European countries that most of the…
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…
For most of its history, Rimini – established by the Romans more than 2000 years ago – was a sleepy provincial town on the Adriatic coast. Within 20 years after the end of WWII, however, two dramatic changes occurred: first came the arrival of mass tourism. And then a local boy, the scion of a…
Of all the major European countries, Italy has always appeared to me the most culturally uniform. There is little that connects the baroque splendours of Catholic Bavaria with the Protestant restraint of Germany’s Hanseatic North and little common ground between Strasbourg and Nice, but there is an “Italianate-ness” of streets and buildings that is immediately…
For our recent journey through Emilia Romagna, a region in northern and central Italy, we decided to hire a car – something we had not done for several years, generally preferring to make our way on public transport and, of course, on foot. After so many years of not using a car for our journeys, I…