The train through the Cinque Terre spends most of its time in a tunnel. That is not a complaint, it is the geography. The five villages sit in ravines on a cliff coast so steep that the only way to…
Supporting Guide
The Best Taormina Boat Tours: Isola Bella, the Grottoes and the Coast Below the Town
Taormina sits two hundred metres above the sea and spends all day looking at it. Everything about the town encourages this. The Corso runs along a shelf in the hillside, the gardens hang off the edge of it, the Greek…
The Best Sorrento Boat Tours: Capri, the Coast and the Bay of Ieranto
Sorrento is not a beach town and it is the best place on this bay to keep a boat waiting for you. That is the honest shape of it. The town sits on a cliff above the water with a…
The Best Positano Boat Tours: Leaving From the Beach You Are Staying On
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…
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…
The Best Time to Visit Corsica
The short answer is June or September, and if you can only take one, September. The longer answer is that Corsica has a narrower good season than the Mediterranean average, because the sea takes a long time to warm and…
Getting to Corsica and Around
Two decisions, and the second one matters more than people expect. Which airport or port you arrive at determines the whole shape of your trip, because Corsica is long and the roads are slow. And whether you hire a car…
Where to Eat in Corsica and What to Order
Corsican food is not French food and it is not Italian food. It is mountain cooking from a poor island, built on three things: pigs that live half wild in the chestnut woods, sheep and goats, and the chestnut itself….
Where to Stay in Corsica: Choosing Your Base
The most useful sentence in this guide: you cannot see Corsica from one base. The island is a hundred and eighty kilometres long with a mountain range down the middle, so the roads go around rather than across. Two bases…
The Best Corsica Boat Tours
More of Corsica is off the road than on it. An entire UNESCO listed reserve has no land access at all. The best beach in the north is a boat ride or a four and a half hour walk. The…
Calvi and the Balagne
The gentlest part of Corsica, and the easiest to love on a first trip. The Balagne was once called the garden of Corsica, and the shape of it explains why: mountains close behind, a fertile strip of olive and fig…
