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…
To tell you the truth about our recent trip to Tuscany: Florence and the Easy Hikers did not quite hit it off this time. Florence, of course, will survive this, but so shall we. We had visited Florence before, many years ago, and still have pleasant memories from this trip. What has changed in the…
Just as any trip to Tuscany feels strangely incomplete without the glories of her capital city, no visitor of Florence should leave without having made an excursion into the surrounding countryside, no matter how brief. Tuscany is one of the world’s truly legendary landscapes, a category which includes places like the Provence and the Black…
For a country with one of the longest coastlines in Europe, Italy – it has always seemed to me – has a surprisingly large number of large landlocked cities: Milan, Turin, Florence. Even Rome, strictly speaking, has no sea harbour (Ostia is more than 30 km away). What is the common secret of these places?…
No trip to Elba would be complete without a search of time past: a visit to places that are associated with the island’s most famous ever resident. A Bonaparte Pilgrimage Walk might feature stations all across the island: the central highlands with Napoleon’s summer residence in San Martino, for example, the west with the residence…
After our first foray into the spectacularly beautiful landscapes of Elba – a coastal walk, nominally, but one which turned out to involve quite a lot of climbing – we were a little apprehensive before our second tour on our itinerary. This route, after all, was to take us all the way up to Marciana…
Elba’s most famous visitor stayed on the island for roughly one year. He left, eventually (although he always emphasized how much he had enjoyed the experience), in search for a better job on the mainland. This did, in the end, not turn out very well for him (he lost his new job after a probation…
When we first visited Siena, as part of a sponsored organized tour, we were taken for a walk down the high street straight into a museum, came out 2 hours later and went, more or less, directly back to the bus. No disrespect to our hosts (one branch of the large and sprawling tree of…
Our final word from last month’s Slow Travel Fest in Tuscany, and we have deliberately set today’s walk apart from the other posts. For two reasons: firstly because the Sentiere Elsa is only incidentally linked to the festival’s central themes (of drilling deep into your holiday destination instead of merely skipping over its surface), through…
Slow Travel, as we told you last week, may involve a lot of hiking, but there is more to it than that. Another key imperative is to take not only your physical self on the journey you are undertaking, but also your mind. Translated into every-day terms this means that the challenge is to take…