What is your idea of easy hiking
The Sacra di San Michele near Turin is Northern Italy’s grandest and most sacred abbey. Italy’s industrial heartland lies within a triangle formed by Genoa, Milan and Torino, but, this being Italy, these three great industrial towns are hardly the equivalent of Dortmund, Manchester or Cleveland and pack a powerful “triple punch” of beautiful architecture,…
If you want to accompany us on the last stage of our Ligurian hill walk, you’d better be ready for some serious climbing In our most recent post, (perhaps a little misguiding) headlined The Five Walks of Finale Ligure, we ultimately gave you only three: a beach promenade, a stroll through the historical centre, and…
This small Riviera seaside town has something for every hiker: two legs, three legs or four This past winter, we have been exploring hiking trails on our local coast, on either side – French as well as Italian – of the Riviera, and what better place to end this series of walks, as the winter…
Apricale may well be the most beautiful but is certainly the most visually stunning of all the towns on the Ligurian hills. It is not only picturesque but also a great base for hiking trips into the Riviera’s mountainous hinterland. Growing out of the cliffside like something perhaps not altogether benign … … the town…
What have the Romans ever done for the French Riviera? Not much, it appears. For our first proper walk of the year – one involving a forest, “big sky views” and mud under our feet – we picked a theatre of ancient local history. You would be surprised how difficult it can be to find real…
The French Riviera would be as beautiful, culturally much poorer without its long history of eccentric Anglo-Saxons With its richly articulated coastline, its pretty coastal villages, its bays and its boats, its nearly perennial sunshine and pleasant temperatures all year round, the French Riviera is a truly blessed spot. But just to prove that nothing…
Théoule-sur-Mer may lack the glamour and urban flair of some of its coastal neighbours in the East, but has a nice little walk attached to it Looking back over the Easy Hiker posts from the last six months or so, it strikes me how few of them refer to anything that we have done on…
… with the sound of sizzling frying pans on our Selva-to-Monte-Pana hike in the Dolomites Something I forgot to mention in the report from our first hike in the Dolomites: for the hiking guides, that hike served as their “orientation tour”, intended not only to familiarize the hotel’s newbie guests with the landscape but also to…
In terms of drama, scale and majestic beauty, few areas in Europe can rival the Italian Dolomites For us, one way of rating the quality of our hikes is simply to count the number of pictures that we have brought home. On some of our hikes in the past, we have made no more than…
The circular walk around the moated castle of Kemnade and the medieval Blankenstein fortress ticks all the boxes of a perfect hiking trail. Some hikes are great because they focus exclusively on One Big Thing and never let you forget how magnificent that One Big Thing is: hikes through the Grand Canyon, for example, fall…