What is your idea of easy hiking
If you have ever visited the Italian Riviera, aka Liguria, one of the things you will fondly remember is the train that connects the various small resort towns along the coast. This train is not one of those fancy high-speed bullet numbers that dash through the countryside. Instead, it takes its time – this is…
Hiking trails on the Riviera generally fall into one of two categories: mountain hikes and coastal walks. Today, we will be offering you an alternative in this fascinating hike in Sasso. The Sasso is a small river, but it nevertheless comes with its own valley and its own patch of wetland. The Sasso’s waters flow…
Several years ago, when we had already established our base on the Riviera but not yet turned it into a proper home, we decided one day to walk from Eze-sur-mer all the way up to Eze village. This turned out to be a fairly tough hike, particularly for that half of the easy hiking team…
Granted: nobody would mistake the Alpes Maritimes for the Himalaya. After all, the mountains which line the coast of the French and Italian Riviera are easily measured in the hundreds of metres rather than the thousands. They can, however, look intimidatingly high when seen from the ground up. When you stand by the sea –…
Whatever anyone will tell you, Rainer Maria Rilke is the greatest poet in the German language. If you do not speak German well enough to read Rilke in the original (or if you think, with Mark Twain, that life is too short to learn it), try – for flavour – a painting of Rilke’s near-contemporary…
Last week, we enjoyed the baroque splendour of the landscaped gardens around the Prinz Moritz trail. Today, we stay in the same area and (roughly) the same period of German history, moving only a few kilometres up the Lower Rhine Valley and a few decades down the line to the time of the friendship between…
Germany is Europe’s premier hiking country: nowhere else on the “old continent” will you be able to find a similarly large number and variety of well-designed and diligently maintained trails. Few hikers outside of Germany, however, will be able to name a trail that does not run either through the Black Forest or along the…
We might as well admit it: summer (the northern European variety, at least) is pretty much over, and full-blown autumn will soon be upon us. But the news is not all bad: this is the right time to take out your hiking boots and go for that long walk that you have excused yourself from…
If you are a frequent guest of this blog, you may remember our “two towns for one day’s walk” series of short and easy hikes which connect two villages along the Riviera coast (like Ventimiglia to Bordighera or Bordighera to San Remo or from Alassio to Laigueglia). In the mountainous back country, meanwhile, such a hike is…
In Tuscany, landscape and urbanity are so closely interwoven that they create one large tapestry of culture which is governed by consistent aesthetic, economic and historical principles. While the Renaissance town palazzi reflect the pride and the wealth of the landowning families (it is said that Florentine rulers never ate or served anything in their…