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…
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…
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….
When you travel to Lake Como, you should dedicate one day of your holiday to finding out more about the town in which you are staying and its immediate surroundings. There is much to see, no matter where you happen to be based – and often from more perspectives than one. For our own holiday…
Are you thinking about visiting Italy but don’t know where to start? Here is an easy and entertaining way of familiarizing yourself with the regions between the Alps and Sicily, their characteristics and their “feel”: just watch a bunch of Italian movies! Movies as guides for a tour through Italy can take you on a…
This is a question that every traveller will, sooner or later, have to answer: is it right to only see or visit what is beautiful at my destination, or should I go for a rounder picture that also includes the typical and the truthful? Lets us say, we are visiting Italy : do we concentrate…
