One of Bergamo’s quiet advantages is everything within easy reach of it. Sit in the middle of Lombardy with good trains and roads running in every direction, and the lakes, the vineyards and two great cities are all a short…
Supporting Guide
How to Get to the Dolomites
The Dolomites feel remote in the way all the best mountains do, and yet they are closer than their drama suggests. You can land at a small Italian airport in the morning, watch the plains give way to foothills over…
The Best Things to Do in the Dolomites
I have come back to the Dolomites in every season, and I still cannot decide whether they are best met on foot, from the seat of a slow cable car, or through a windscreen on a high pass at dawn….
The Best Time to Visit the Dolomites: A Month-by-Month Guide
I am often asked, usually over dinner and usually by someone who has just booked flights, when they ought to go to the Dolomites. The honest answer is that there is no single best time, only a best time for…
The Best Photo Spots in the Dolomites
I have never quite made peace with the fact that the Dolomites photograph better than they have any right to. Most beautiful places ask you to work for the good frame, to hike and wait and forgive the weather. These…
Victoria’s Guide to Cortina d’Ampezzo
Some towns you arrive in, and some you arrive above. Cortina d’Ampezzo belongs to the second kind. Whichever road you take, you drop down into a wide green bowl ringed by pale towers of rock, and the town lies at…
Where to Stay in the Dolomites
The question I am asked more than any other about these mountains is not which trail to walk, but where to put down a suitcase. It matters more here than almost anywhere I know. The Dolomites are not one place…
The Best Hikes and Via Ferrata in the Dolomites
I have walked in a great many mountains, and I still cannot think of a range that gives so much for so little effort as the Dolomites. You step off a chairlift into a meadow, turn a corner on a…
Victoria’s Guide to Val Gardena and Ortisei
There is a particular kind of arrival that tells you a valley is going to be kind to you. You come up out of the Isarco gorge, the road tips over a lip near Ponte Gardena, and suddenly the world…
A Venice Itinerary: One to Four Days
Venice looks small on a map and is anything but, because you move at the pace of your own feet and the boats. That is the first thing to make peace with, and once you do, the city opens. You…
Where to Stay in Venice
There is a moment, usually on the vaporetto in from the airport or stepping off the train at Santa Lucia, when Venice stops being an idea and becomes a set of very specific decisions. The first of them is where…
The Best Day Trips from Venice
The lagoon does not end at San Marco. I learned this slowly, on the mornings when the city felt too full and I wanted the horizon to open a little, and every time I came back I understood Venice better…
