Eating well in Assisi is less about hunting for a hidden gem and more about slowing down enough to notice how good the everyday food is. This is Umbria, the green heart of Italy, and the cooking here is honest…
Supporting Guide
Where to Stay in Assisi
Where you stay in Assisi shapes the whole trip, more than in most towns I know. Sleep inside the walls and you get the thing people come for: pale limestone lanes emptying of daytrippers by evening, bells at dawn, a…
An Assisi Itinerary: One to Two Days
Assisi is small enough to walk end to end in about twenty-five minutes, which fools a lot of people into thinking one day is plenty. It is, just about. Give the town a single day and you will see the…
The Best Things to Do in Assisi
The best things to do in Assisi are not a checklist to race through, they are a slow unspooling of one small pink-stoned town on the flank of Monte Subasio. I have come back more than once, and every time…
Getting Around and Day Trips from Pisa and Lucca
Getting around Pisa and Lucca is one of the quiet pleasures of this corner of Tuscany, and it asks very little of you. Two walkable historic centres sit half an hour apart by train, a small international airport feeds straight…
Best Photo Spots in Pisa and Lucca
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…
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…
