Italy

Two days in Rome is not enough. Let’s get that out of the way, because every guide pretends otherwise and then hands you a list of nine things per day. What two days is enough for: the ancient core, the Baroque centre, one great meal a day, and one evening that you’ll actually remember. The

Italy is forgiving. Nobody’s going to ruin your trip because you ordered a cappuccino after lunch, whatever the internet says. But there are a handful of mistakes that genuinely cost people money, time or a decent meal, and almost everyone makes at least three of them on a first visit. Here they are, in rough

Milan gets a rough deal from travellers. It’s the city people fly into on the way to the lakes, give a day to, and write off as grey, businesslike and not proper Italy. Some of that’s fair. It was heavily bombed in the war, rebuilt fast, and it does not look like Florence. But it

This is the decision that shapes an Amalfi Coast trip more than any other, and most people make it based on which town looked best on Instagram. Which is how you end up carrying a suitcase up 200 steps in August, or staying somewhere lovely and quiet and then spending two hours a day on

Florence is small. Genuinely small, about a mile across, and after three days most people have seen the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Accademia and the Ponte Vecchio and are wondering what’s next. What’s next is that Florence sits at the centre of the best regional rail network in Italy. You can be in a completely

Most people book Italy for June, July or August, stand in a queue at 35 degrees, and come home saying it was beautiful but exhausting. October is the month I’d pick, and it’s not close. Fewer people, better prices, and food that only exists at this time of year. There are real trade-offs though, and

Naples has an image problem and it’s mostly unfair. Rubbish, crime, chaos, the Camorra. People book one night on the way to the Amalfi Coast and spend it slightly on edge. What’s actually there: the best archaeological museum in Italy, a Baroque city centre that’s a UNESCO site, catacombs, the food capital of the country,

Bologna sits an hour from Florence and two from Venice, and most people go straight past it on the train. Their loss, genuinely. It has the oldest university in the world, 38 kilometres of covered walkways, a tower you can climb, and the best food in a country that takes food more seriously than almost

Here’s the thing nobody tells you before booking the Amalfi Coast: hiring a car is often the worst possible decision. The coast road is a single lane each way, cut into a cliff, with blind hairpins and buses coming the other way. Parking, where it exists, costs more per day than a decent lunch. In

Capri gets 2 to 3 million visitors a year onto an island of four square miles with about 12,000 residents. In August it’s genuinely difficult to walk down the main street. It’s also one of the most beautiful places in the Mediterranean, which is why the Romans built villas here and why everyone’s been arguing