easy hiking trails in Europe
Finally, a few notes about the Veneto’s largest and most famous town. We must talk about Venice: this is as inevitable when posting about the Veneto region as it is inevitable to visit Venice when travelling there. No matter what you may have heard about the floods of water and visitors that threaten to destroy…
Beautiful provincial cities may be the true treasure of Italy, but the country’s beautiful landscapes are at least as attractive. The Veneto – rolling hills and scenic rivers wedged in between the Alps and the Adriatic coast – is near the top in the list of Italy’s most picturesque regions, and it would be a…
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…
Long urban and country walks are great but they do take up a lot of time: time to organize and to prepare, time to travel, time to do the actual walking. Such walks can easily become projects around which you have to structure not only the day itself but your entire weekend break, squeezing other…
What are the must-have ingredients for an entertaining and enjoyable walk? Well, trees and plants, to begin with, … … then wide open spaces with scenic views into the far distance, … … and on top of that, some bright sunshine would help, if only to highlight the colours of the scenery with a radiantly…
The Altes Land, a few kilometres outside of Hamburg, is Europe’s largest fruit orchard. More than 10 million cherry and apple trees are growing here on the southern bank of the Elbe river, inviting you to stroll through a sea of colour and scenic beauty. That was what we had in mind when we boarded…
St Pauli is the oldest of Hamburg’s Szeneviertels, although you would not have called it a “trendy neighbourhood” when people began to settle here in the late Middle Ages. St Pauli started its life as Hamburg’s messy attic: everything that the municipal administration did not want inside the city walls but, for various reasons, did…
In Germany, more even than in other European countries, the most interesting parts of major cities can be located in the “trendy neighbourhoods”, the Szeneviertel as the Germans call them – a term which, perhaps inadvertently, references the world of the theatre. Inadvertently or not, however, the analogy feels appropriate because these quarters appear to…