easy hikes and city walks in Italy
At first glance, the small lakeside town of Orta – located roughly 70 km north of Milan at the foot of the Italian Alps – comes across as a typical Instagram town: beautiful … … but perhaps a little too confident in the expectation that her many admirers will be so dazzled by her looks…
The Easy Hikers have been going on country hikes and urban walks in roughly even proportions for well over 10 years now, and I still cannot decide which of the two I would go for if I could pick only one. Simply stated, the problem is this: a good country hike beats a good urban…
Magnificent panoramas are woven into Turin’s cityscape like car factories and the river Po. Sometimes, you do not even have to leave the town center to enjoy these spectacular vistas … … but what you can see on any given day depends as much on the season (we took the picture above several years ago…
More than any other Italian city, Turin is a creature of modernity. For 200 years, it was the engine room of Italy’s intellectual, political and economic development of becoming a modern state: always ahead of its time, looking boldly into the future. But then, at the end of the 19th century, it suddenly decided to…
Taranto is not one of Italy’s Instagram destinations. There are no grand piazzas lined by statues from Michelangelo and other artists whose names you may remember from high school, no scenic inland waterways that break up the sunlight into thousand shards of sparkle. Taranto’s beauty is of a different order – and, on top of…
For many years, Lecce was the only major tourist destination in the entire mezzogiorno, the bottom of the Italian boot south of Naples. The town likes to style itself as the “Florence of the South” and can bolster this claim with some great architecture from different periods … … but particularly with its richly decorated…
Many people come to Brindisi, but few stay for longer than it takes to hop on to a ferry or a train. Brindisi is not a destination but a hub: tourists who are flying in to visit the heel of the Italian boot often take a bus to their holiday destination directly from Brindisi airport…
Genoa is full of surprises – even for routine visitors like us. Although we have come often over the years – we love Genoa’s “big city feel” that no other place near us can match – we still discover new things every time we visit. Most recently, strangely enough, we saw for the first time…
The main attraction of Varese is, without a doubt, the Sacro Monte del Rosario. This is not to say that there is nothing else worthy of your attention in this handsome northern Italian town. Varese has a colourful city centre … … that has developed around the town’s historic core of medieval cathedral and baptistry…
Italy was the birthplace of the tourism industry. For the 500 years since the invention of the “Grand Tour” by English aristocrats, foreign visitors have flocked to Italy in ever-increasing numbers to sing the praises of the country in any language and any medium at hand, from painting and poetry to TV programmes and Instagram….