Travelling in Italy

Travel Tips

• Rent a Tuscan farmouse from my friends Rita and Lino
• Tour Tuscany, Umbria or Sicily the relaxed way, with Tartaruga Tours.
• Travelling by train in Italy? Go here for all the information you'll ever need.
• Article: Venice's Anti-Pickpocketing Squad (read between the lines for tips on how to avoid having your own pocket picked)
• New York Times Italy Travel Planner

Useful online travel forums for Italy, and how often you'll find me in them:

• Fodors.com Travel Talk - often
• Travelers to Go! - frequency unknown, it's a new board
• VirtualTourist.com - Travel Forum - Italy - sometimes
• Lonely Planet | Thorn Tree Travel Forum - occasionally

Imaging in Italy

My friend Tony's Imaging in Italy site has been updated - do drop in for a visit. For those who missed my report in 2003, Imaging in Italy is a wonderful thing to do in Rome: a photographic walking tour with Tony Boccaccio, who photographed for National Geographic for 30 years, and is an all-round fun and fascinating person, as well as a great teacher. I enjoyed the course and learned a great deal.

Reflections on Travelling in Italy

Apr 25, 2006

One impression I had of both France and Spain, at least the parts we were in, is that many commercial districts look somewhat seedier than similar areas in Italy. I can't quite put my finger on why. Shop signs seem more garish, and sometimes worse maintained (fading paint, etc.), and shop windows often look cluttered and dusty. Somehow, even the smallest Italian shop usually presents a more pleasing face to the world, and even the cheap shops don't look cheap.

In Italy window-dressing is an art, with the more expensive shops hiring specifically-trained people to do it. How do even the smallest shops manage to look so good? My guess is that there is some innate Italian sense of design, nurtured by the stylish and elegant environment in which most shops find themselves - if your competition looks good, you'd better look good, too.

Italy also spoils you for being a tourist anywhere else. There is very little tourist crap in 99% of Italy, the glaring exceptions being Florence, Venice, and some parts of Rome. Everywhere else in the world you can expect to see stall after stall of statuettes, t-shirts, ash trays, etc. with depictions of local famous monuments - probably all of it manufactured in China.

There are also few tourist trap restaurants in Italy (with the exceptions noted above). And, even in those, the food is usually decent - I suspect because no self-respecting Italian could bear to serve really bad food, no matter how ignorant the clientele.

What's your favorite little-known gem in Italy?