Italy: a first-timer’s guide

For Europeans, fall in America looks like the stuff of wanderlust, with fiery trees and pumpkin spice lattes à la Gilmore Girls. 

Think the Midwest is just a cornfield you fly over between coasts? Don’t be fooled by that nonsense.

The 37th America’s Cup sailing race will take place in the year 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. However, the first of three preliminary regattas before that event has kicked off in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a coastal city some 30 coastal miles [50 kilometers] south of Barcelona. Out of six racing teams from New Zealand, the U.S., U.K, Switzerland, Italy and France, the French Orient Express team cooly breezed into a win on the first competitive event on a hot 85 degree [29 Celsius] Saturday mid-afternoon.

Talk of the “invaders” started in the early spring. Along Italy’s northern Adriatic coast and in Tuscan fish farms workers were pulling up their nets and finding them chewed to threads.

The small island of Ikaria, with its 164km (102 miles) of undulating coastline, sits serenely in the midst of the Northern Aegean islands, just a hop from the much larger Samos.

The first time I traveled for two weeks with a backpack, it was the lightest I'd ever packed for the longest trip I'd ever taken. I had everything I needed, but I was surprised to find that I could have packed even lighter. 

“The Ducati trail?” My husband was suddenly excited. “Do we get to ride motorbikes?”

The first written evidence of beer being brewed and consumed dates back as far as 4,000BC, with the ancient Sumerians believed to have developed the earliest known methods for creating the alcoholic drink. Its history and connection to human civilisation runs deep, and a number of today’s beers have their own remarkable heritage.

Italy may be best known for its epochal cities and dazzling seaside havens, but the country’s hilltop towns and borghi—medieval throwbacks found from the Alpine north to Sicily—also draw throngs of visitors—more than three million trek to San Gimignano alone each year. While the most popular hilltops are in Tuscany and Umbria, you’ll find the most unusual one, Seborga, on the western Italian Riviera, not far from the French border. Yes, Seborga has all the bells and whistles you might expect of an Italian hill town—a palace fortress, cobblestone alleys barely an arm span in width, knock-out views and hyper-local rustic cuisine, but in addition it has a ceremonial head of state who isan elected prince or princess, its own currency, stamps, and national anthem. Seborga’s recent history, unlike that of any other village in Italy, centers on a decades-long quest to become a stand-alone principality, like Monaco, which on clear days, you can see from one of its lookouts.

Each year, I Borghi Più Belli d’Italia, an association dedicated to preserving and promoting the heritage of the country’s smaller, often rural destinations, announces new villages to add to its list of the most beautiful places in Italy. In August the association named six new borghi, ranging from the regions of Piedmont to Basilicata.

Remote, wild and rugged, Donegal is a place like no other in Ireland. Home to some of the most spectacular scenery the country has to offer, the country’s northernmost county must not be missed.

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