This is the best day out from the Costa Smeralda, and the one most likely to disappoint you, and the difference between those two outcomes is almost entirely about what you were told before you booked. So let me get…
Supporting Guide
Porto Cervo: What to Do in a Village Built in 1962
Porto Cervo is younger than my mother and it is designed to look older than my grandmother, and once you have noticed that you cannot stop noticing it. There was nothing here before 1962. Not a fishing village that grew,…
The Best Beaches on the Costa Smeralda
The beaches here are not the reason the Costa Smeralda is expensive. That is worth saying first, because it changes how you plan a week. The beaches are free. All of them. There is no gate, no wristband, no booking…
The Best Time to Visit the Aeolian Islands
The Aeolians have a narrower usable season than most of Italy, and the reason is not temperature. It is boats. These islands depend entirely on a ferry network, and that network expands and contracts with the year. In August there…
Filicudi and Alicudi: The Islands Almost Nobody Visits
At the western end of the archipelago there are two more islands, and most visitors never see either. They are the oldest of the seven and the furthest out, the boats are thinner, and there is very little to do…
The Best Beaches in the Aeolian Islands
The first thing to say, because it is the thing people are not expecting: there are almost no golden sand beaches in the Aeolian Islands. These are volcanoes. What you get instead is black sand, grey shingle, pale pumice gravel…
Vulcano: The Crater, the Mud Baths and the Warm Sea
Vulcano is the closest island to Sicily, the easiest to reach, and the one most people see first, which is why it is also the one most often visited on bad information. Two things need saying immediately, because both change…
Panarea: The Expensive One, and Whether It Is Worth It
Panarea is the smallest inhabited island in the archipelago and by a wide margin the most expensive, and those two facts are related. It is three and a half square kilometres. There is no room for a road network, so…
Stromboli and the Volcano Climb: What You Can Actually Do
Before anything else, because a lot of people arrive having booked on information that is six years out of date: you cannot climb to the summit of Stromboli. Access to the summit area has been prohibited since the paroxysmal eruptions…
Salina: Capers, Malvasia and the Green Island
Salina is the one people wish they had booked. It is the second largest of the Aeolians and the only one that is properly green, and the reason is water. Salina has springs, which none of its neighbours really do,…
Lipari: The Practical Heart of the Aeolians
Lipari gets written about as the boring one, and that is unfair and also useful. It is the largest of the seven, it has the most people, the most beds and the most boats, and because of that it reads…
How to Get to the Aeolian Islands
There is no airport on any of the seven islands, and there never will be, because there is nowhere flat enough to put one. So getting here is a flight, a transfer and a boat, in that order, and the…
