The provincial capital of Bolzano has a long history, rich cultural attractions – and even some lessons for all of us. One thing is for sure when you go hiking in the Gardena Valley: sooner or later you will come to Bolzano, in nearly all respects the hub of the province, if only between trips…
Themed Walks in London A walk through the “Florence of the 21st Century” The City of London is where most of the capital’s truly iconic works of modernist architecture are concentrated, but West London, too, has many fine new buildings. The big difference is this: while London’s business district provides a homogeneous context of brashness…
Athens does not do many things, but what it does, it does very, very well The great tourist attractions of the world can be divided into two groups, the foxes and the hedgehogs, representing either destinations that do many things reasonably well or destinations that do only one thing but have mastered this to the…
Walks in the Italian Riviera Taggia and Arma – a tale of two towns Another “two Italian towns for the price of one” walk, but one with a difference. You may remember: last year, we invited you to accompany us on a walk from Porto Maurizio to Oneglia, the two sister towns that together make…
Easy Hiking in the French Riviera The View from the Roquebrune Castle Life on the French Riviera has not always been sweet – at least not for everyone, not all of the time. Life was certainly not sweet for the inhabitants of Roquebrune Castle that we found (just to the east of Monaco) on one of our recent…
Urban Walking in Paris Some Themed Urban Walks in Paris There are times and occasions when it becomes simply impossible to have a civilized encounter with nature. When temperatures hover just above freezing, the wind is howling and the wet cold seeps under your skin, you would not dream of going on a “pleasure hike”…
Where to Go in Germany Bacharach in Half a Day Rick Steves, in one of his “Europe in the blink of an eye” itineraries that Europeans feel so smug about, suggests to his readers to spend two nights in the Rhineland town of Bacharach, as much time as you are allowed to dedicate to Venice…
Got two hours in Nice? The French Riviera is best understood not as a region or an area but as a single town, a thin coastal strip of settlements never more than a kilometre deep that is stretched out over a distance of 50 miles, like an extruded French version of Los Angeles. With two…
Spend Two Hours in Hamburg The best thing about Deutsche Bahn’s Across-the-Country 1-day rail pass (the “Quer-durchs-Land” ticket or QdL for short) is that it’s very cheap. Forty eight euros for two people on any regional train in Germany: that’s an unbeatable offer. Journeys take a little longer than on the fast IC trains, that…
Hiking near Paris The Parisian Banlieue – a term covering anything from just outside of the city limits to villages and small towns a one-hour railway journey away – has a bad reputation, not all of it undeserved. But for every town over which a pallor of tristesse – actually, the bitterness of exile –…
