easy hikes and city walks in Italy
Beautiful provincial towns are Italy’s true treasure. Almost every country in Europe has one or two Grade 1 tourist attractions, but only Italy can tempt visitors with a seemingly endless list of Grade B sites, all of which merit a long weekend if not, perhaps, a full-length holiday. Vicenza is another of these hidden gems…
Here is something you probably did not see coming. After last week’s walk – which took in the moat around the old city walls of Treviso, the town’s scenic canals and the statue of a “nude female torso” that is freely dispensing water from her nipples – you probably thought we had dealt comprehensively with…
Here is a warning: If you cannot stand the sight of water … … and if you are particularly allergic against streams that are narrowly framed by rows of ancient buildings … … you should stay well clear of Treviso because, once you are there, you will find no way of escaping your nightmare. You…
No account of Orta would be complete without a piece on its most eye-catching feature: the island of San Giulio that sits a few hundred meters away from the town in the middle of the lake, mounted like a precious stone on a shimmering expanse of blue. Generally speaking, it is a good idea to…
Knights, peasants and mendicant friars who, 1000 years ago, journeyed throughout Europe in search of a direct encounter with God have written one of the most fascinating chapters of medieval history. The age of pilgrimages can be separated into three distinct periods: the earliest pilgrims sought out the shrines of saints in the hope that…
At first glance, the small lakeside town of Orta – located roughly 70 km north of Milan at the foot of the Italian Alps – comes across as a typical Instagram town: beautiful … … but perhaps a little too confident in the expectation that her many admirers will be so dazzled by her looks…
The Easy Hikers have been going on country hikes and urban walks in roughly even proportions for well over 10 years now, and I still cannot decide which of the two I would go for if I could pick only one. Simply stated, the problem is this: a good country hike beats a good urban…
Magnificent panoramas are woven into Turin’s cityscape like car factories and the river Po. Sometimes, you do not even have to leave the town center to enjoy these spectacular vistas … … but what you can see on any given day depends as much on the season (we took the picture above several years ago…
More than any other Italian city, Turin is a creature of modernity. For 200 years, it was the engine room of Italy’s intellectual, political and economic development of becoming a modern state: always ahead of its time, looking boldly into the future. But then, at the end of the 19th century, it suddenly decided to…
Taranto is not one of Italy’s Instagram destinations. There are no grand piazzas lined by statues from Michelangelo and other artists whose names you may remember from high school, no scenic inland waterways that break up the sunlight into thousand shards of sparkle. Taranto’s beauty is of a different order – and, on top of…