easy hikes and city walks in Italy
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…
Water. If you want to know what shapes and sustains the Mediterranean way of life, just follow its flow. Drinking water is the magical essence of the Mediterranean alchemy. It turns scruffy woodlands into orchards and lush gardens, baking-hot courtyards into oases of coolness and calm, and parched savannahs into fertile fields that can sustain…
Greek heritage is big in eastern Sicily. Most places in this part of the world were established by Greek settlers, after all, and have the ruins to prove it. But even in this distinguished company of heritage sites, Siracusa is in a class of its own. For one, there is the hardware: Siracusa’s Temple of…
There is a group of tourist destinations throughout Europe that I like to refer to as the Instagram Girls of the Grand Tour. You can find these destinations in every corner of the continent, but no matter how large the distance between any two such destinations may be, you will find that they have more…
Today, we start telling you about the walks we squeezed into the pauses between the various lockdowns over the past six months. This is something we did in October 2020. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. You probably knew that already. What you may not have known is that it is also the…
A little over a year ago, we deconstructed the French Riviera’s mainline railway route and gave you a station-by-station guide to tell you a little bit about the towns and the landscapes that lie on the far side of the stations’ concourses. Today, we are going to do the same for Italy: The Italian Riviera…
There is a good chance that Prato is the largest Italian town that you have never heard of. It is the second largest city in Tuscany, larger than Pisa, Livorno and Siena, and also larger than any other city between there and Rome. On top of that, it is no industrial hell-hole (you may not…
Last week, John and Julie asked us to take them on a walk. We had met John and Julie for the first time shortly after our arrival in Menton, nearly seven years ago. They were already familiar with our little corner of the world back then, but freely admit that they still have relatively little…
To tell you the truth about our recent trip to Tuscany: Florence and the Easy Hikers did not quite hit it off this time. Florence, of course, will survive this, but so shall we. We had visited Florence before, many years ago, and still have pleasant memories from this trip. What has changed in the…
Just as any trip to Tuscany feels strangely incomplete without the glories of her capital city, no visitor of Florence should leave without having made an excursion into the surrounding countryside, no matter how brief. Tuscany is one of the world’s truly legendary landscapes, a category which includes places like the Provence and the Black…
