easy hiking trails in Europe
Matera is the ugly caterpillar on the tree of international travel destinations. 70 years ago, the town was the epitome of the backward, benighted Italian South, so poor and neglected that it was officially designated a national disgrace – la vergogna nazionale – by the country’s first post-WWII government. Today, it is one of Europe’s…
Last week, I said that Bari was not a mandatory stop on the Great Italian Tourist Tour. Today, I would like to qualify that a little. It is true that most printed travel guides refer to Bari only in passing, but they do recommend it as a convenient stopover to a place which has become…
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…
Why yearn for faraway countries when so much beauty is close at hand? I would love to say that we went to explore the Parc du Cap Martin on the French Riviera inspired by these famous words of Goethe, but the truth is far more prosaic: a friend had invited us for a drink in…
“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…
Today, we will be offering you: a lake that looks occasionally like a piece from the Amazon jungle … … a river that looks occasionally like a canal … … a gem of an old town with plenty of interesting views and motives … … and a spate of horses, largely in one shape and…
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…
Last week, we discovered that the “Cézanne Walk” in the artist’s home town of Aix-en-Provence is not the perfect route to finding out more about his paintings. We shall be making up for that today, venturing a little out of town for a “pilgrimage of artistic discovery” to a place which is, more than anything…
For many years, Aix-en-Provence had cornered the market for Picturesque Market Towns In Southern France. Easy-to-reach (just over an hour by train from Marseille) and pretty-to-look-at, it ticks all the important boxes for visitors. If you came from Northern Europe or North America and wanted to see a Typical Town In Provence, old men playing…