Italy

Turin gets skipped. People fly into Milan, head for Lake Como or Venice, and never consider the city an hour and a half west that has 18km of covered arcades, the best Egyptian museum outside Cairo, and the place where chocolate and hazelnut were first combined into a paste. Yes. Nutella starts here. We’ll come

Five villages, one train line, and a decision that people agonise over far more than they need to. Here’s the short version: they’re 5 to 20 minutes apart by train, you’ll see all of them regardless, and the only thing your choice really changes is what your evenings look like. That said, the evenings are

Matera is a city of caves in the arch of Italy’s boot, and in 1952 the Italian government forcibly evacuated it because conditions were considered a national disgrace. Infant mortality was around 50%. Families lived in rock chambers with their animals. Sixty years later it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2019 it was

Pompeii is 66 hectares. That’s about 90 football pitches of Roman city, and it’s the single most common mistake people make here — they arrive at 11am with no plan, wander for two hours in 35°C heat, see a lot of walls, and leave slightly underwhelmed. Done properly it’s one of the most extraordinary places

Everyone does Florence and then wonders what else Tuscany has. The answer, for most people with a spare day, is Siena and San Gimignano — and the honest version is that one of them is a proper city you could spend two days in and the other is a very beautiful village you’ll be finished

Two days in Florence is either perfect or absurd depending on who you ask. Art historians will tell you it’s an insult to the Uffizi. Realistically, most people have a long weekend and a budget, and Florence is small enough that 48 hours genuinely works. The historic centre is about 1km across. You can walk

Rome has roughly 12,000 places to eat and a solid chunk of them are actively trying to rip you off. Sorry, but that’s the situation. Walk within 200 metres of the Colosseum and you’ll find laminated menus with photos on them, a guy outside saying “amico, come, come”, and carbonara made with cream. The good

Everyone photographs the Colosseum. It’s a fine building and your photo will look exactly like the four hundred million that already exist. Rome’s real photographic quality is in its smaller, stranger corners: keyholes, staircases, orange trees, courtyards you have to know about. Here are the spots worth setting an alarm for, and roughly when the

Verona sits between Milan and Venice, and most people either skip it or give it two hours built entirely around a balcony that was added to a building in the 1930s. Which is a shame, because Verona has a Roman amphitheatre still in use, a genuinely lovely river, and one of the best squares in

Both are in northern Italy, both have mountains, both have ferries and pretty towns. And people booking a first trip to the Italian lakes agonise over which one for weeks. They are genuinely different, and the right answer depends almost entirely on who you’re travelling with and what you want to do all day. Here’s