Positano is a town you look down from and almost never look back at. Everybody arrives from above, by bus or by car, and walks down. So the view you carry away is the one from the top of the…
Archives for September 2026
The Best Capri Boat Tours: Around the Island and Into the Blue Grotto
You can spend a whole day on Capri and never see it. That sounds like a line, and it is not. The ferry drops you at Marina Grande, the funicular takes you up to the Piazzetta, and from there the…
The Best Amalfi Coast Boat Tours: The Whole Coast, From the Water
The road along this coast is the famous thing and it is the wrong way to see it. I say that having driven it, been driven along it, and taken the SITA bus down it with my knees against the…
Santorini – The View You Have Already Seen
You have already seen this place. That is the difficulty. Before the ferry has finished turning into the bay you know the shape of what is coming, because you have seen it on a thousand screens, in other people’s holidays,…
Scopello, and the Film That Was Not There
I drove out of Palermo with a film in my head. That is the embarrassing part, so I will put it first. An hour west, the road climbing inland and then coming back down toward a sea you keep losing…
I Stayed This Time – Costa Smeralda
Last night I went down the steps at half past eight, while it was still the evening I had come for. Tonight I did not. I should be honest that this was curiosity rather than appetite. I had written that…
The Bus Goes to the Flamingos – Cagliari
At four o’clock I was standing in a lane in Castello that has been a lane since the Pisans, with washing over it and a cat asleep on a step. At twenty past five I was looking at several hundred…
Nobody Drives Into the Middle – Corsica
Forty minutes from the beach I was cold. Properly cold, in a dress that had been correct all week, standing next to the car with my arms crossed like somebody’s aunt. Below me and behind me the sea was still…
The Hour Nobody Plans For – Costa Smeralda
Half past seven, and there was nobody on the road. Not quietly. Not fewer cars than usual. Nobody. I drove for about ten minutes between two bays on the Costa Smeralda and did not pass a single car in either…
Salina, and a Day With Nothing In It
The hotel is a family house that grew. You can see where. A room added on one end, a staircase put in later and left outside, a terrace built over what was probably once a yard, and all of it…
The Water Is the Point
The colour is not a lie. I want to say that first, because I came here half expecting it to be one. Everything else on this coast has been arranged by somebody, and I had assumed the water had been…
Filicudi, and the Green Light in the Cave
The boat leaves early because of the light, and because by eleven the water at the arch has other people in it. There were four of us and the man who owned the boat. He did not talk. I have…
