Sometimes, it is best to know little or nothing about the destination you are about to visit: this allows you to keep the option open of surprising yourself. Sometimes, however, a little knowledge can help – and feel like adding a key ingredient to the sauce that turns a pleasant but bland meal into something…
Most people would classify Sestri Levante as a “tourist town”, but you should not think that this is a good reason for bypassing Sestri on your tour of Northern Italy. First of all, because the tag “tourist town”, although commonly used with more than a hint of contempt, is not, if you think about it,…
In these bleak mid-winter days of sleet, snow and icy winds: what could possibly bring more joy than a trip to a place where you can still feel the breath of summer on your neck, a place where, while the season’s paraphernalia (parasols and pleasure boats) may have been mothballed, the spirit of summer is…
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…
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…
Once upon a time, Genoa was a global power. The city republic was one of the most influential and dominant players around the Mediterranean Sea and across Europe, with far-ranging interests in both the Old World and the New, in the Orient as well as in America. As a consequence, the Genoese became rich and…
One of the best – perhaps the best – thing about travelling in Italy is this: you arrive at your destination and find that everything is better than you felt you had a right to expect. You go to eat in a simple trattoria (or simply buy something from a bakery) and the food is…
The Romans never much liked the Riviera. They found its stony slopes too tiresome for agriculture, its small settlements too poor to plunder, and its mountainous interior too difficult to protect against the troublesome natives. Which is why the Romans did not settle in great numbers here and only ever built a few garrisons in…
One of the main tourist attractions of the Italian Riviera actually lies a few miles further inland: no visit to this stretch of the Mediterranean coast would be complete without a trip to at least one of the Ligurian mountain villages with their narrow lanes and dark cobbled alleyways. Ligurian Mountain Villages Ten or twenty…
