easy hikes and city walks in Italy
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 three good reasons to visit the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa, one of Italy’s (and Europe’s) most famous and important “cities of the dead”. (Hemingway called the Staglieno “one of the wonders of the world”, and writers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche and Mark Twain were among its admirers.) First, architectural history. Archaeologists…
If you are a frequent guest of this blog, you may remember our “two towns for one day’s walk” series of short and easy hikes which connect two villages along the Riviera coast (like Ventimiglia to Bordighera or Bordighera to San Remo or from Alassio to Laigueglia). In the mountainous back country, meanwhile, such a hike is…
In Tuscany, landscape and urbanity are so closely interwoven that they create one large tapestry of culture which is governed by consistent aesthetic, economic and historical principles. While the Renaissance town palazzi reflect the pride and the wealth of the landowning families (it is said that Florentine rulers never ate or served anything in their…
One of the best, perhaps the single best feature of the Cinque Terre’s signature trail – the Blue Path – is its variety of views: you see the villages from different angles, sometimes in isolation and sometimes several at a time, sometimes from the front and sometimes from behind, sometimes from far away and sometimes…
Italy’s Cinque Terre National Park is home to the Mediterranean’s most famous network of hiking paths. So famous in fact that nearly all our acquaintances have, over the years, reacted with stunned disbelief when we told them that we – despite living so close to the Cinque Terre’s home region of Liguria – had never…
The Beodo palm grove is one of the most stunning sights in the whole of Northern Italy. If you have ever taken the bus from Ventimiglia in the direction of Sanremo and Genoa, you will probably have seen it and may have wondered what transported this piece of tropical landscape to the northern Italian coast….
One of the most reliably surprising experiences of any trip to the Riviera usually happens right at the start, even before you have fully arrived. When you come by plane from northern Europe, you will be flying over the snow-capped peaks of the High Alps one moment, then you blink, and the next time you…