If you are looking for a reliable way to date cities, here is one clue: look at the churches: If the town centre is studded with churches that look somehow Gothic but not quite (“Neo-Gothic”: overcooked in parts, half-raw in others), then the city in question is mainly a child of the 19th century. If…
If you like forest hikes that are attractive and at the same time not overly strenuous, I bet you will like this one. It has, after all, everything that an Easy Forest Hiker could possibly expect. You will be entertained by glimpses of dense undergrowth that seem to come straight from the primeval woodlands of…
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…
Some cities leave you a choice of where to go for an easy hike. You can pick between a walk alongside a lake or a river, a stroll through the gardens of an ancient castle and a journey to a beauty spot up a hill. But not all cities are quite so generous. Some cities,…
Lou Camin Nissart is the first of its kind in France: a Grande Randonnée, a top-category hiking trail, that goes around a town in a loop, similar to what the périphérique ring road does in Paris, only for hikers. And with far more pretty views, since the town in question is Nice, the scenic capital…
The southern German spa town of Baden-Baden has been attracting visitors since the dawn of the tourism age in the 19th century. It is renowned for its beauty … … as well as for its historic sites that include the elegant casino where the Russian writer Dostoevsky conducted intensive research for his novella The Gambler…
Despite the sassi, the rock churches and all the other fascinating things that you can see in Matera, the highlights of any walk around the town are the magnificent views across the Murgia landscape. But this landscape is not only there to be marveled at. After all, all those bright lines that are zigzagging up…
“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…
How many forests must a man walk down before you can call him a hiker? I have no idea. But here is something I do know. Long before you have reached even half that figure, you will have experienced a case of “hikers’ dejà vu”: the feeling that you have walked down the same forest-dash-coast…
When in Dijon, do as the Dijonnais do. Which is why we – on our recent trip to the capital of Burgundy – followed the Sentier du Martin-Pecheur, advertised in the official literature as the favourite “easy hiking” route of the Dijonais. First of all, a clarification to avoid disappointment: the word “pecheur” in the…
