Bergamo is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, and the local cooking is exactly what you want from a place with the Alps at its back: buttery, generous, built on cheese and polenta and slow-cooked meat. This is not delicate coastal…
Supporting Guide
How to Get to Bergamo
A tourist exiting a train in Bergamo. Getting to Bergamo is refreshingly simple, and it is one of the reasons the city makes such a good base for northern Italy. You can fly almost to its doorstep, or reach it…
The Perfect Bergamo Itinerary: One to Two Days
Bergamo is small, which makes it perfect for a short, unhurried visit. Here is how I would spend a day, and how I would stretch it to two if I had them, keeping the pace gentle and leaving room to…
The Best Time to Visit Bergamo
Bergamo is a city for all seasons, sheltered a little from the extremes by its position between the Lombard plain and the Alpine foothills. But some months are lovelier than others, and the right timing can turn a good visit…
The Best Photo Spots in Bergamo
Bergamo is one of those cities that seems designed to be photographed: a walled town on a hill, honey-coloured stone, long views over the plain, and a great square that has been admired for centuries. The trick is less finding…
The Best Day Trips from Bergamo
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…
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…
