Hikes in Piedmont
Turin has two sides, we told you last week, and if that was news to you, you may be as surprised to hear that this binary character is also reflected in the city’s topography. Two rivers are crossing Turin, one is wide and luminous, an integral part of the townscape – it passes Piazza Veneto…
If Rome is the heart of Italy and Naples the country’s soul, then Turin is its head. The capital of Italian coffee, cars and cocktails (the home of Lavazza, FIAT and Martini) is also the most rational and most transparently structured city in the land, a place so square that it is not only the…
Today, we will offer you ideas of how to engineer a perfect three-day discovery trip to an unfamiliar destination. For starters, make sure that the three days are really three different days, not the same day played on repeat. One way of doing this is to assign different types of sightseeing activities to each of…
Tourist Italy mainly consists of cities and towns. There are beaches and lakes, of course, but close your eyes and conjure up an image of an Italian tourist destination, and I bet that it will be the image of a historic town: Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples – urban destinations are also Italy’s Big Beasts…
The town of Alba in Piemonte, approx. 50 km south of Turin, is beautiful in a way that Italian towns appear to have patented for themselves. It has a beautiful central piazza, … … and, to counterbalance the weight of 2000 years of history, a more busy and modern town square (between Via Roma and…
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…
The Santuario di Oropa aka Sacred Mountain of Oropa, in the northern Italian region of Piemonte is one of the largest sacred shrines in the Alps – and also one of the most storied. It all started with St Eusebius in the 4th century: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as the legend has…
The shorelines of Lake Mergozzo and the Lago Maggiore are less than a mile and a world apart. Where the Lago Maggiore is sublime and dramatic, Lake Mergozzo is serene and understated – and where the former is besieged by crowds, you can conduct a walk around its near neighbour in blessed solitude. The contrast…
On one level, the Borromean Islands in the Lago Maggiore can be seen as three independent destinations: as three little towns that have developed in as much isolation from one another as it is possible for places only a few hundred meters apart. Alternatively, however, you can also understand them as cogs in the same…
Northern Italy’s Lago Maggiore may be a big lake – so big that hiking around it will take you a week or more – but its three most celebrated beauty spots are packed into a tiny sub-section. In the Golfo Borromeo, the Lago’s narrow side arm between Stresa and Verbania, you can find all three…