Castellammare del Golfo — the small Sicilian fishing town halfway between Palermo and Trapani, with a 10th-century Arab-Norman castle, a working fishing harbour, the Tonnara di Scopello and the Zingaro nature reserve on its doorstep, and the historical distinction of having exported half of the Prohibition-era American Mafia.
The places Francis of Assisi actually lived, walked, and died — from the Porziuncola and San Damiano to La Verna, Greccio, and the small edicola at Piandarca where he preached to the birds. A secular travellers guide to the geography of his life, with the 2026 centenary calendar.
Nocera Umbra is the Umbrian hill town behind the mineral water. Beyond the bottling plant: a Lombard necropolis, a cathedral with the incorrupt body of Saint Raynald, a Franciscan pilgrim geography, and a painstaking restoration after the 1997 earthquake.
Mantova is a small city of 50,000 people on a bend of the Mincio river, surrounded on three sides by three artificial lakes. From any approach, the skyline — a cluster of red brick towers, pale stone duomos, the 500-room…
Maratea is the only town on Basilicata’s Tyrrhenian coast. The regional coastline there is thirty kilometres long — squeezed between Campania in the north and Calabria in the south — and the town of Maratea occupies almost all of it.…
Bevagna is a walled town of five thousand people twenty kilometres south of Assisi, on the flat of the Valle Umbra. It does not appear in most international guidebooks. It has never had a railway station. It has one traffic…
Orvieto sits on top of a cliff. The cliff is a single block of volcanic tufa, 300 metres across, rising 150 metres above the surrounding countryside with nearly vertical sides. The Etruscans built a city on the flat top in…
The Cinque Terre is fifteen kilometres of cliff between two small seaside towns — Levanto in the west and Portovenere in the east — broken by five fishing villages that the sea has been trying to swallow for 800 years.…
Genoa has been Italy’s working port for two and a half thousand years. It is also — less famously but just as truly — the city with the largest medieval centre in Europe, forty-two UNESCO-listed Renaissance palaces on a single…
Ancona is the city that every ferry passenger sees from the car deck and almost nobody gets off the ship to visit. It has a Roman triumphal arch on the water, a Romanesque cathedral on a headland, and the best…
