The best photo spots in Pisa and Lucca are not, in the end, the ones you already have on your phone from someone else’s holiday. Yes, there is the tower, and yes, there is the tourist crouching on the lawn…
Supporting Guide
Best Time to Visit Pisa and Lucca
The best time to visit Pisa and Lucca is late spring or early autumn, when the light is long, the walls are made for walking, and the coach crowds at the Leaning Tower thin out by mid-afternoon. I have been…
Where to Eat in Pisa and Lucca
Where to eat in Pisa and Lucca is a question with a happier answer than most people expect, because almost nobody comes here for the food. They come for a leaning tower and a walkable wall, eat one indifferent lunch…
Where to Stay in Pisa and Lucca
Where to stay in Pisa and Lucca is the one decision that quietly shapes everything else about these few days, and I want to save you the wobble I had the first time. The short version is that I sleep…
The Leaning Tower of Pisa: Tickets, Climbing and Tips
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of those sights that survives every cliché thrown at it, and I say that as someone who arrived a little braced for disappointment. It is smaller than you expect and stranger than the…
Best Things to Do in Lucca
The best things to do in Lucca reward a slow pace, and the town seems built to enforce one. Inside a ring of Renaissance walls, the streets curl and double back, opening without warning onto a piazza shaped like an…
Best Things to Do in Pisa
The best things to do in Pisa reach a good deal further than the one photograph everyone arrives for. Yes, the tower leans, and yes, you should go and stand under it. But Pisa is a proper city with a…
Two Days in Pisa and Lucca: The Perfect Itinerary
Two days in Pisa and Lucca is, to my mind, the most quietly rewarding pairing in this corner of Tuscany, and the itinerary below is the one I keep returning to. Pisa gives you the marble and the myth, the…
The Best Things to Do in Bologna
The best things to do in Bologna are the sort you stumble into rather than queue for: a red portico that carries you dry through a rain shower, a market lane thick with the smell of mortadella, a whispering arch…
Bologna Itinerary: 2 Perfect Days (and How to Add a Third)
This Bologna itinerary is the one I actually use when friends land at Bologna Centrale and ask me how to spend a couple of days without exhausting themselves. The good news is that the centre is small, walkable, and roofed…
Where to Stay in Bologna: The Best Areas and Hotels
Working out where to stay in Bologna is easier than it looks, because the city is small, walkable, and wrapped almost end to end in porticoes that make the day’s weather somebody else’s concern. The historic centre is compact enough…
Where to Eat in Bologna: The Food Capital of Italy
Working out where to eat in Bologna is the happiest homework a traveller can be set, because this is the city Italians themselves call la Grassa, the Fat One, and it earns the nickname at every table. Emilia-Romagna is the…
