easy hikes and city walks in Italy
Bari, the largest city on the Adriatic coast, is not a mandatory stop on the Great Italian Tourist Trail. No Renaissance masterpieces are on public display, the town’s history does not feature names that you would recognize from old High School lessons, and you will not see reflections of magnificent medieval architecture in the sparkling…
“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…
After the 12th century hydraulic engineer Alberto Pitentino had surrounded Mantua with a network of artificial lakes on three sides, he went on to complete the ring of water around the old town by adding a canal in the south, providing merchants and traders with both a fresh water resource and a cross-town transport route….
The north Italian city of Mantua is that rare thing, a town entirely surrounded by water. Three lakes and a river … … provide a luxuriant setting of natural beauty for the architectural gem in their middle, turning Mantua – quite literally – into a treasure island. In view of such a magnificent and stunning…
Water. If you want to know what shapes and sustains the Mediterranean way of life, just follow its flow. Drinking water is the magical essence of the Mediterranean alchemy. It turns scruffy woodlands into orchards and lush gardens, baking-hot courtyards into oases of coolness and calm, and parched savannahs into fertile fields that can sustain…
Greek heritage is big in eastern Sicily. Most places in this part of the world were established by Greek settlers, after all, and have the ruins to prove it. But even in this distinguished company of heritage sites, Siracusa is in a class of its own. For one, there is the hardware: Siracusa’s Temple of…
There is a group of tourist destinations throughout Europe that I like to refer to as the Instagram Girls of the Grand Tour. You can find these destinations in every corner of the continent, but no matter how large the distance between any two such destinations may be, you will find that they have more…
Today, we start telling you about the walks we squeezed into the pauses between the various lockdowns over the past six months. This is something we did in October 2020. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. You probably knew that already. What you may not have known is that it is also the…
A little over a year ago, we deconstructed the French Riviera’s mainline railway route and gave you a station-by-station guide to tell you a little bit about the towns and the landscapes that lie on the far side of the stations’ concourses. Today, we are going to do the same for Italy: The Italian Riviera…
There is a good chance that Prato is the largest Italian town that you have never heard of. It is the second largest city in Tuscany, larger than Pisa, Livorno and Siena, and also larger than any other city between there and Rome. On top of that, it is no industrial hell-hole (you may not…