easy hiking trails in Europe
When I tell you that we visited a park last weekend to get away from midwinter blues, you will still have no idea of the type of thing that we saw and the type of experience that we had. Whether we had a pleasant but essentially low-octane stroll between flowerbeds, well-tendered lawns and playgrounds for…
Christmas cheers are fading, Christmas dinners have been cleared away, and most Christmas trees will soon be demobbed. But as soon as one annual ritual is over, it is already time for another one: we are entering the season of New Year resolutions. If you are still looking for a cheering splash of coulour, here…
The key difference between small cities and large cities resembles the difference between a single song and an album collection. Nice in the south of France is an excellent example for the single: attractive and catchy, but essentially a play on one motive or melody. Paris, conversely, unites a wide range of different themes: luxurious…
Did they meet? That is always the question when we read about two famous people who were sharing some sort of geographical proximity at one time or another. Adolf Hitler and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (“the limits of my language are the limits of my world”) went to the same school in Linz. Anton Czekhov…
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…
The Romans never much liked the Riviera. They found its stony slopes too tiresome for agriculture, its small settlements too poor to plunder, and its mountainous interior too difficult to protect against the troublesome natives. Which is why the Romans did not settle in great numbers here and only ever built a few garrisons in…
William Shakespeare is arguably the world’s greatest writer, but he is also literature’s great man of mystery. We know almost all of his plays and poems, but little of the man himself. Unusually for a man of letters, we do not know his “philosophy” and where he stood on the great issues of the day…
Paris, as we have documented many times, has practically everything that makes a city worthwhile visiting: great art, great food, great history, even – believe it or not – great one-day hikes. More than enough of the latter, in fact, to fill nearly a whole website. Considering all that, it feels almost rude to voice…
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…
After last week’s long, hard slough through Vienna’s musical history, today we will be offering you something completely different. A short Vienna walk which is as short as it is sweet – in the spirit of 19th century concerts where it was not at all frowned upon to round up the performance of a serious…