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…
Locals always tell visitors of Northern Sicily to do three things during their stay: go to Palermo and visit at least one of the city’s markets (been there, done that), take a swim at a coastal beach resort and to visit one of the region’s colourful villages and small towns. And since these picturesque small…
The Italian South is not all of one piece, contrary to what visitors from the North (folks like us) may assume. Rather than having been cut from the same cloth, it is a coat of many colours. Think of the American South, if you will: Tennessee is not like Louisiana, and Texas is another story…
Genoa, “La Superba”, proudly stands apart from the rest of the country – and, in many ways, does not feel like an Italian city at all. It is neither elegant (like Milan) nor full of joie de vivre (like Naples), and it is certainly not an open-air museum where everything has been neatly arranged for…
For today’s post, we are going to climb the Vomero, the other hill of Naples, the one that does not have smoke coming out of its ears. Or rather, I should say, we were going to climb the Vomero, because that was the original scenario. We wanted to tell you all about the Salita del…
Matera is the ugly caterpillar on the tree of international travel destinations. 70 years ago, the town was the epitome of the backward, benighted Italian South, so poor and neglected that it was officially designated a national disgrace – la vergogna nazionale – by the country’s first post-WWII government. Today, it is one of Europe’s…
Last week, I said that Bari was not a mandatory stop on the Great Italian Tourist Tour. Today, I would like to qualify that a little. It is true that most printed travel guides refer to Bari only in passing, but they do recommend it as a convenient stopover to a place which has become…
Bari, the largest city on the Adriatic coast, is not a mandatory stop on the Great Italian Tourist Trail. No Renaissance masterpieces are on public display, the town’s history does not feature names that you would recognize from old High School lessons, and you will not see reflections of magnificent medieval architecture in the sparkling…
“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…
