For almost 10 years now, Becky and I have been going to Italy for a journalism conference in Perugia in April, and each time we tack on some vacation time either before or after, and travel to a different part of the country. The first year it was a quick Rome trip, then it was Florence for the day, and then more elaborate trips to Venice, and then to Sorrento, Cinque Terre, and the Amalfi Coast -- and then our most recent trip to Matera. So when I came across this travelog web application, I decided to create my own (I also have one for all of our travels. You can drag the map around if you want, and double-clicking makes it zoom in. Take a look around and let me know what you think or if you have any questions, shoot me an email!
Our main destination in Italy every year is Perugia, where the amazing International Journalism Festival is put on every year by our friends Chris Potter and Arianna Ciccone. Perugia is a university town high up on a hill in the Umbria region, not far from Assisi (Trivia: Francis of Assisi was injured in a war between his town and Perugia, which is how he became a monk). The old city of Perugia, where the conference is held, was built in the 1200s and sits on the ruins of an even older city built sometime before 300 BC, a capital of the Etruscan empire. One of my favourite buildings in Perugia is the circular church you can see below -- it used to be a pagan temple when it was built in about 300 BC or so, but later became a church, and you can just walk inside and look around. The venues for the festival are all incredible, but especially the Sala dei Notari, a hall with massive curved beams and walls covered in frescoes. When I gave a presentation there the first year I was invited, all I could think about was that it was already old when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Most years we stay in the Brufani Palace, a massive old hotel on the edge of the old city, which has a pool in the basement with a plexiglas window through which you can see down into the ruins the hotel is built on. Over the years, we've made so many good friends through the conference, and it has allowed us to explore so much of Italy.
We've been to Rome several times now, and it keeps getting better every time. The first time we ran around the city seeing various sights from the outside -- the Vatican, the Colosseum, the Forum etc. -- but didn't really go into anything except the Pantheon. On our second trip, we did a self-guided audio tour of the Vatican and the Palatine Hill/Forum as well as the Colosseum, all of which were amazing (if you get a chance to go, don't take one of the expensive guided tours -- the audio ones are way cheaper and you can go at your own speed). On our third trip we re-did some of the same things because we were with friends who hadn't done them before. We've eaten at a lovely little restaurant near the Trevi fountain and walked the Spanish steps, and for many years now we've stayed at the same little hotel off the beaten track near the train station, a lovely little French-style hotel on the third floor of this beautiful old apartment building, with a tiny little metal elevator barely big enough for Becky and I and two suitcases (it got stuck between floors once, but let's not talk about that). We've seen some beautiful Caravaggios. And we've had some fantastic meals, thanks to advice from the late Anthony Bourdain -- who said to find a neighborhood trattoria and order cacio e pepe, which we did -- and from a friend who is half-Italian who lives in Rome and has steered us towards some great restaurants. There's still lots of things we would like to see though, like the Vatican catacombs and gardens, so we will just have to go back.
In 2015, we spent some time in Venice before the conference in Perugia, taking the train from Rome, which gave us a fascinating look at the Italian countryside. We found a lovely little hotel in an ancient villa right on the Grand Canal, with the usual tiny little elevator to the third floor, and six or seven huge rooms with beautiful wooden beam ceilings. We made what in retrospect was a very smart move and bought an all-you-can-ride pass for the "vaporetto" or water bus, which allowed us to get on and off whenever we wanted. We took the vaporetto out to the Lido, a long island that's part of Venice but is mostly a vacation spot with beaches -- which was a little weird in early April -- and then to the islands of Murano (famous for its glass-blowing) and Burano (famous for its coloured houses). And we took the requisite gondola ride and tour through canals, which was fascinating. Our gondolier said his singing voice was terrible, so we didn't quite get the traditional tour, but he knew a huge amount about the history of Venice. Venice has a lot of beautiful aspects to see in the daytime, but I think nighttime was my favorite, because of the way the lights of the city reflected in the Grand Canal.
In 2016, Becky and I decided to spend some time in Sorrento, a seaside town just south of Naples, so we took the high-speed train from Rome to Naples and then -- at the suggestion of our friends Christopher and Arianne from Perugia -- took the ferry from Naples to Sorrento so that we could enjoy the view of the classic hotels and villas perched on the cliff as we entered the harbor. And I'm really glad we did, because when I booked the hotel room, I just thought it was one of the hotels in downtown Sorrento -- I didn't realize until we were arriving on the ferry that our hotel was one of the ones on the cliffside, with elevators that go down to private beach areas (which weren't open because it was so early in the season). The hotel had an amazing deck covered in wisteria vines, and we somehow wound up with an amazing corner suite with a massive balcony from which we could see Vesuvius and the bay of Naples. Sorrento is a great little town, especially if you like seafood, and we also did a boat tour of Capri and the various grottos -- including a trip into the famous Blue Grotto, which was spectacular -- as well as a tour of Pompeii and a tour of Herculaneum, another town that was destroyed by Vesuvius, but in a different way (hot mud instead of lava and ash).
In 2017, my friend Anna Masera, who ran the graduate journalism program at the University of Turin (or Torino, as the Italians call it), invited me to speak to her class, so we headed from the conference in Perugia to Turin by train and spent a few days wandering around the city with Anna acting as our unofficial tour guide. Located in the northwestern part of Italy, Turin was at one time the capital of Italy and has a number of beautiful palaces and museums, as well as the legendary Shroud of Turin. It has a very Parisian feel to it, since it is very close to France and used to be aligned with that country before modern Italy was created in 1861. Thanks to Anna, I found the cafe that invented one of my favorite coffee drinks, the Bicerin (espresso, chocolate syrup and heavy cream) as well as the cafe near the river where Nietschze wrote most of his seminal work Ecce Homo. We also toured the Museum of Film, which is located in the amazing Mole, an unusual tower that used to be a synagogue. Turin is a beautiful city, partly because it is located right beside a lovely river, called the Po. After Turin, we took the train to Cinque Terre.
After our visit to Torino in 2017, Becky and I took the train south to Cinque Terre, which is the name given to a series of five ancient fishing villages on a stretch of coast known as the Italian Riviera (which is actually part of a province called Liguria). In addition to their picturesque architecture, which features incredibly tight alleyways and staircases and brightly colored houses, Cinque Terre is known for the walking trails between the villages. Unfortunately for us, the seaside trails between several of the towns were closed due to landslides (a common problem in the area) so we hiked from the town we stayed in, Vernazza, to the largest of the five villages, known as Monterosso (the only one you can drive to). Then we took the tiny local train to the last of the five, Riomaggiore, and hiked around it for awhile, then took the train to Manarola and walked around there a bit, then the train to Corniglia -- the only town that is up on a hill rather than close to the sea -- and then hiked back to Vernazza, where we arrived just as the sun was setting. After that hike, it was all we could do to make it up the narrow staircases and winding alleys to our hotel room. We also had dinner in a restaurant that was built into the side of an ancient Saracen fort, with the sea spray crashing into the rocks right beside us. It was fantastic.
In 2018, after spending some time in Rome, we met some friends, rented a couple of cars and headed south to a villa we rented in the little town of Massa Lubrense, just south of Sorrento and Naples. The villa had a huge rooftop deck that looked out over the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the distance, and a great outdoor barbecue and patio. One day, we hired a boat captain named Guglielmo who took us to Capri, where we saw all the various grottos (the Blue Grotto was closed, unfortunately, due to rough seas) and the famous Faraglioni rocks (you're supposed to kiss as your boat goes through the arch), and we explored Pompeii and hiked up Vesuvius (which, in classic Italian style, has an espresso bar at the top). But the highlight of the trip was our tour down the Amalfi Coast to the seaside towns of Amalfi and Positano. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was fantastic to have a boat all to ourselves. And Guglielmo told us all about the villas on the islands as we drove by, and pointed out landmarks, and then waited near the pier until we were ready to go home. We also had some great meals in Massa Lubrense, including a lovely dinner at a tiny, family-owned place on the edge of a hill, as the sun was setting over Capri in the background. Another highlight for me was driving down the coast. This was my first time driving in Italy, and I have to say I enjoyed the incredibly narrow and twisty streets of the Amalfi area. I even got the finger from an Italian driver for being too aggressive, which I took as a badge of honour :-) I wrote more about our Amalfi trip on my blog.
We spent an afternoon in Florence (or Firenze, as the Italians call it) on one of our first trips to Italy, but we didn't really get a chance to see much, apart from the beautiful city itself, and the view from the top of the bell tower of the Duomo cathedral (which is spectacular, and well worth the hundreds of steps it takes to get there). So in 2019, we decided to really devote several days to Florence and its amazing galleries. So we rented a cute little Airbnb not far from the Duomo, and spent most of one day at the incredible Uffizi Gallery, which has literally hundreds of rooms filled with amazing Renaissance art. It was almost overwhelming, there was so much! The next day, we decided to go to the Galleria Dell'Accademia, primarily because that's where Michelangelo's David is. We were resigned to standing in line for at least a couple of hours, because it went around the block -- but then, a man and his wife came up to us and offered us their tickets!They had run out of time to see the gallery and wanted a couple to have them. So we went to the front of the line after only about 10 minutes -- and then spent at least half an hour just staring at David, who was quite a bit larger than I expected. And of course, I had to have a steak Florentine, which weighed in at a little over a kilogram :-) And then we had to spend a couple of hours walking around just so I could digest it all! And one afternoon, we took the train to Pisa, which of course is known for its famous leaning tower, but also turns out to have quite a spectacular basilica as well. I wrote more about our trip to Florence and Pisa here.
We missed out on going to Italy in 2020 and 2021, because of a little something called COVID, but we were not going to miss another year, so in 2022 we returned -- and this time, after the conference we rented a car in Rome and picked up our friend Anna, and drove down to Puglia, a region in the south of Italy on the eastern coast. We stayed in a lovely little bed-and-breakfast that Anna's stepdaughter runs near Lecce, on what used to be an olive farm (unfortunately, all of the olive trees had died off due to some kind of bug), and we had some lovely seafood lunches near the beach, and Anna and I swam in the Ionian sea (which, I'm not going to lie, was chilly). And we toured a couple of small seaside towns -- where I also went swimming in the sea -- and spent some time in Gallipoli (the Italian one, not the Turkish one where there was a huge battle in the First World War). But the biggest highlight was going to the ancient hill town of Matera, one of the oldest inhabited places in the world -- people have been living in ancient limestone caves (or "sassi") there for over a hundred thousand years. More recently, some of the caves have been turned into cafes and restaurants and Airbnbs. We stayed in one right beside the main cathedral, with an incredible view of the old city. And we hiked down an old goat track into the valley and across a swing bridge and then up the other side to one of the ancient caves on the opposite hillside, with an amazing view of Matera itself. Truly a once in a lifetime kind of trip! I wrote a bit more about our trip to Puglia and Matera here.