easy hikes and city walks in Italy
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…
Just as Italy is not just the sum of Rome, Florence and Venice, Campania – the region south of Rome and its province of Lazio – is more than Naples plus the Amalfi Coast. Today and over the next few weeks, we will present this region to you in its full diversity, offering you something…
Here is how to explore Naples: if you only have two hours – time to kill between two trains, let’s say – I would suggest you walk up and down Via Tribunale, the main street of the city since Roman times. If you have one full day, you may want to extend your focus to…
There are several ways of discovering a city. For Naples, we suggest to discover the city through its art. Don’t worry: we are not proposing to explore the city by walking from one Caravaggio to the next. We invite you instead to follow us on a stroll through Napoli’s unique open air art museum, which…
If it is true that, as they say, all art aspires to the condition of music, Italian gardens aspire to the status of opera – with their love for grandeur, spectacle and full-throttled drama. This aspiration, however, does not burn with the same passion in all of Italy’s gardens. When, after the Renaissance, Italy fell…
We began our brief series of Roman walks where the city’s history began: on its legendary “seven hills”. Today, we will finish there as well, returning to the starting point of our journey but focusing on what has always been the odd one out of Rome’s seven hills The Aventino on the Eternal City’s southern…
Here is a quiz question for you. What is the only European country that has never possessed any kind of a railway network? Hands up everybody who said “the Vatican”. Wrong! (The correct answer is Andorra.) Don’t feel downhearted if you could not get it right, as the New York Times comforts those of its…
Our latest trip to Rome was the 4th time we visited the city. We went first in the mid-1980s when the world was a different place: the Iron Age of the modern world. Many things have changed since then, but the Eternal City is not one of them. Which, after all, is why it bears…
When you are in Rome for the first time, you should do what everybody else is doing: walk past the Roman ruins, visit the Vatican museums, jump into the Fontana Trevi. For the second time, rather than doing all of that again, you should try something else. Like jump into another fountain, so-to-speak. Extend your…
Who ever says that you cannot turn back time has never been to Biella. Or, more precisely, has not taken the funicular elevator from downtown Biella up to the oldest part of town, 50 metres up and 100 years back. Our Time Travel in Biella We travelled to Biella (and near-by Oropa) as a stopover…