There is only one of these five villages where you can properly lie down beside the sea, so this morning I did the sensible thing and went there. Vernazza has its little harbour and its boats, but it does not…
The Complete Guide to Cinque Terre
Cinque Terre means “the five lands,” and that is exactly what it is: five small villages strung along a stretch of the Ligurian coast so steep and so folded that for most of their history the easiest way between them…
Somewhere Smaller
Florence let me go the way the great cities always do, without ceremony, as though it had never really been holding on. One morning I was beneath all that marble and the next I was on a train heading toward…
For When You Are Ready
I had one day left in Florence, and only then did I realise I had been saving it without quite admitting it to myself. All week, coming and going from the hills, I had left certain streets unwalked and certain…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Tuscany
Tuscany is the Italy of the imagination made real: rolling hills striped with cypress, honey-stone towns on every ridge, vineyards and olive groves running to a blue horizon, and a light in the late afternoon that has drawn painters and…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Florence
Florence is the city where the Renaissance was born, a compact, walkable jewel on the Arno where Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Venus and Brunelleschi’s impossible dome sit within a few minutes of one another. It is a city of art and…
