The water is the thing. Corsica sits in deep water with no shallow shelf, so the sea comes in clear over pale granite sand and bands out from almost colourless at the shore, through turquoise, to a deep ink blue…
Archives for September 2026
A Corsica Itinerary: 7 to 10 Days
The mistake with Corsica is the map. It looks like an island you could loop in three days. It is a hundred and eighty kilometres long with a mountain range down the middle, so the roads go around rather than…
The Best Things to Do in Corsica
Corsica’s problem, if it is one, is that most of the good things are at opposite ends of a slow island. So this is ordered by what is genuinely worth building a day around rather than by geography, with a…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Corsica
Corsica is French, and almost nothing about it is. You land expecting the south of France and you get somewhere that eats smoked liver sausage and chestnut flour, speaks a language closer to Tuscan than to anything spoken in Nice,…
Matera at Six, When the Town Comes Back
Nothing happens here between two and six. I want to be accurate about that rather than atmospheric. At two in the afternoon in the middle of August I walked from one side of the Sassi to the other and passed…
The Morning Boats at Alghero
I got up at six because I could not sleep, which is becoming a habit, and I went down to the harbour because it was the only thing open. That turned out to be wrong. Half the town was open….
Alghero, and the Sea on the Wrong Side
I have been on the east side of Italy for most of the summer, and I did not notice what that had done to me until the first evening here. The sun goes down in the wrong place. That is…
Day Trips from Alghero
Alghero sits in the best-placed corner of Sardinia for getting out of town, and one of the trips is genuinely among the great drives in the Mediterranean. Here they are in the order I would do them, with honest timings,…
The Nuraghi and Necropolis Near Alghero
Sardinia has something like seven thousand stone towers standing in its fields, built by people who left no writing at all, and almost nobody who comes here for the beaches goes to look at one. Two of the most accessible…
Alghero’s Catalan Heritage
Every street sign in the old town of Alghero is written twice. Italian on top. Underneath, in smaller letters, the same street in a different language: carrer instead of via, plaça instead of piazza. It is not decoration and it…
The Best Alghero Boat Tours: Sailing the Coral Coast
Alghero faces west into open sea, and there is nothing between this coast and the Balearic Islands. That single fact decides what boat trips here are like. This is not the cave-hopping of the Amalfi Coast or the island circuit…
Neptune’s Grotto and Capo Caccia: How to Visit
Twenty minutes west of Alghero the land simply stops. Capo Caccia is a headland of white limestone that drops something close to two hundred metres straight into the sea, and from the water it does not look like a cliff…
