After the 12th century hydraulic engineer Alberto Pitentino had surrounded Mantua with a network of artificial lakes on three sides, he went on to complete the ring of water around the old town by adding a canal in the south, providing merchants and traders with both a fresh water resource and a cross-town transport route….
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…
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…
On my bookshelf of travel literature, there is also a German book on the Italian Riviera, which is 400 pages strong and which describes every church, historical palazzo and – so it seems – every hamlet on the Ligurian coast with a Teutonic passion for detail. But there is no mention of Bogliasco. Not a…
Travel destinations can be broadly divided in two categories: the “hedgehogs“ that know how to do one thing only (but know this one thing very well), and the “foxes” that know many things. If hedgehogs – say the Niagara Falls and Venice – were books, they would be like detective stories: no matter how much…
The charms of Southern Piemonte – as we saw last week – may be rich and many, but a beautiful landscape is not one of them. Most of Southern Piemonte consists of flat, endless fields, so your best bet for a day trip is a town walk. The historically most interesting town in the area…
