Italy

Puglia and Basilicata in ten days: six stops, the route that connects them, and the ZTL mistake that costs people a fine months later.

Most Amalfi itineraries cram in eight towns and spend the trip on a bus. Five stops, how many days you actually need, and why you should not hire a car.

Lake Orta is the smallest of the major northern Italian lakes and the only one west of the Ticino river, which is roughly why nobody goes. It’s 40 minutes from Lake Maggiore, 90 minutes from Milan, and it has one village, one island and almost no tour coaches. If Como has become a queue and

Millions of people fly into Bergamo every year and immediately get on a bus to Milan. The airport is even marketed as “Milan Bergamo”, which does the city no favours at all. Bergamo is a walled medieval town on a hill, 50 minutes from Milan, and it’s genuinely one of the loveliest small cities in

Trieste doesn’t feel Italian, and that’s because for most of its modern history it wasn’t. It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s only major seaport for five and a half centuries, and it only became permanently Italian in 1954. So you get Viennese coffee houses, Habsburg architecture, a Slovene-speaking hinterland and a Serbian Orthodox church on the

For about 150 years Ravenna, not Rome, was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Then it was the capital of Ostrogothic Italy, then the Byzantine capital in the west. Nobody remembers this, and the city has spent the last thousand years being quietly overlooked. What survived is eight UNESCO-listed buildings containing the best-preserved Byzantine

Genoa is the biggest port in Italy, it was once a maritime republic that rivalled Venice, and almost nobody stops there. People fly into it for the Cinque Terre, or drive past it towards Portofino, and the city itself gets an afternoon at most. It deserves considerably better, and it’s the cheapest major city in

Sardinia has water the colour of a Caribbean brochure and it’s a two-hour flight from most of Europe. It also has 7,000 Bronze Age stone towers, a language that isn’t Italian, and an interior almost nobody visits. Most people see the beaches and go home. That’s a fine holiday. It’s also about a third of

Everyone goes to Como. Lake Maggiore is the next one west, it’s bigger, it has three islands covered in baroque palaces and botanical gardens, and it costs meaningfully less. It also has roughly none of the George Clooney tourism. If Como has started to feel like a queue with a view, this is where you

Umbria is the region next to Tuscany that gets none of the attention, and the locals are quietly fine with that. Same hill towns, same cypress trees, same food culture, roughly half the visitors and noticeably lower prices. It’s also the only Italian region with no coastline and no border with another country, which is