Travel news, information on the best places to visit in Italy, where to go for vacation suggestions of travelers, personal trip experiences, and HIKING: follow me on my exploration of the most exciting adventures
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“Vacation mode” — light, with some real notes on architecture and a couple of other people’s opinions to counterpoint my voice.
With this heat — when everything, quite literally, melts — everyone is looking for shelter somewhere. Some by the sea, some by the lake, some with their own clever tricks (share yours in the comments: how do you beat the heat?).
I decided to take a break from my usual “investigations” and simply stroll with you through Milano Centrale, the main railway station of Milan, taking in the Mussolini-era architecture and the general tourist traffic.
Near the pass and along the mule tracks leading up from Ceresole Reale, it is still possible to identify the ruins of the former barracks and stone military posts, - and the engravings
When the waiting finally ended
There’s a second date worth setting beside Chaberton’s, further along the same wall of concrete and silence, three years later. On the night of 8–9 September 1943, hours after Italy’s armistice with the Allies was announced, a GAF colonel named Giovanni Jon — a Piedmontese, in command at Tarvisio on the wall’s opposite end, facing not France but the sudden, unwanted new enemy of Germany — sounded the alarm and gathered his men on the barracks square. He read them Marshal Badoglio’s proclamation and told them, in effect, that their war was starting now. None of the roughly three hundred men present objected. They held the position against an attacking Waffen-SS regiment for six hours. Twenty-four of them died there; forty-eight more were wounded.
Emotional toll of Alpine Warfare. Look up. The mountains before you represent more than just indescribable beauty. They represent the pain and toil of their defenders.
Above Lago Agnel, at 2,300 metres, the ground stops pretending to be gentle. To the right, Punta Violetta climbs to 3,031 metres. To the left, lower and less dramatic, Colle Agnel sits at 2,510.
And somewhere between the two, tucked along the old military track before the Colle del Nivolet, a square of broken stone and concrete is still holding its shape against the mountain.
It doesn’t look like much. A collapsed wall here, a firing slit there, half-buried in rock that the retreating glaciers polished smooth ten thousand years before anyone thought to build on it. You could walk past it and mistake it for a shepherd’s ruin. It is, in fact, a listening post — a small fragment of one of the strangest defensive projects Italy ever attempted: the Vallo Alpino del Littorio.
A wall that was never tested
In 1931, with the memory of the First World War still raw and the newly built Maginot Line rising across the French border, Mussolini’s general staff ordered the construction of a defensive system that would eventually stretch the length of Italy’s Alpine border — from Ventimiglia on the Ligurian coast to Fiume on the Adriatic. It was meant to make the frontier, in the language of the original directives, “hermetic.” Impenetrable.
A classic survival yarn: the mountain has been testing people who think they own a piece of it
Up on the plateau, where everyone goes, there are lakes scattered everywhere. Normal people climb up from Rifugio Savoia and walk straight ahead, toward whichever lake the trail signs point to that day.
I, as usual, did not do what normal people do. I decided I wanted to see the other lakes — the ones off to the right, the ones nobody mentions.
It seemed only fair to start at the rifugio, since the rifugio itself is not quite what it looks like. Today, it’s a place where you buy a coffee and a slice of cake before a hike. A century and a half ago, it was a royal hunting lodge — one of the wooden houses Vittorio Emanuele II had built across this plateau in the 1860s, after declaring the entire Gran Paradiso massif his private hunting reserve. The king wanted the ibex for himself, and he wanted it badly enough to ban anyone else from touching it. It is one of those details history hands you for free: the same selfish decree that let one man shoot as many ibex as he liked is the reason the species survived at all, while it vanished from the rest of the Alps.
This is the story that transforms a mystical, dark legend into something even more disturbing, because it removes the supernatural and replaces it with reality, which is worse. MUCH worse.
There is a place in Piedmont where the name itself cannot make up its mind.
Lucedio. Say it slowly. Luce — light. From the Latin lux, the same root that gave us Lucifer, the morning star, the bringer of light, before he fell. The monks who arrived here in 1123 preferred a gentler etymology: lucus Dei, the grove of God. A sacred clearing in the wilderness.
They had come from Burgundy, from the monastery of La Ferté, and they were Cistercians — the reformers, the disciplinarians, the White Monks who had founded their order precisely because other monasteries had grown slack and worldly. They believed in silence, manual labour, and the absolute primacy of prayer. They were, by all accounts, serious people.
Choosing between a big city and a small town in Italy involves significant trade-offs regarding cost, career opportunities, and social integration. Here: Confrontation outlines of pros and cons
Two kinds of expats move to small-town Italy. The ones who romanticise it so hard they forget to check whether there’s a pharmacy within 30 kilometres. And the ones who actually stick around.
I’ve been living in this area for a few years now, and I’ll be honest: I go out alone most of the time. I called a friend to come with me to see a menhir in Mazzè last week. She wasn’t feeling well. Called another. Too busy. I didn’t even call the third one because I already know that her partner, now retired and living with her, doesn’t look favorably on her friends.
This is not a complaint — it’s just the reality of adult social life, anywhere in the world. The difference is that in a small Italian town, the loneliness can hit harder when you don’t speak the language yet, and the community feels impenetrable. But it’s not, and Mazzè is actually only a good example to speak of why.
The miracle of wanting to go somewhere again, after months of numbness.
The car thudded. Then it creaked. Then — I swear — it meowed. And then it stopped.
I was somewhere on a mountain road, sixty or seventy kilometers from home, and I felt the familiar cold hand of dread. This is it. Tonight I’ll sleep in the car. I have mandatory insurance, but the kind that looks good on paper and doesn’t quite reach you when you’re stranded on a cliff at dusk.
But my old Mitsubishi — God bless the hands that built her and the soul that gave her to me — had paused for dramatic effect. A breath. A theatrical moment. Because that is her character, she is battered and dented and beloved, and she has taken me places no sensible vehicle would agree to go. I stroked her roof and told her she was magnificent. My golden hen. My mountain witch.
Five Euros, One Field, and a Business Idea: The Expats Who Brought Their Homeland With Them — and Made It Bloom
A few days ago, I drove about an hour from Biella to see tulip fields — entire fields of them, not just a vase on a windowsill. I’m a devoted tulip planter, so when I read there were farms worth visiting, I woke up early and went.
The town nearby is medieval and half under construction, its narrow streets the kind that make you wonder whether your sat-nav has quietly given up on you. But then the town ended, and fields spread out on all sides. I turned down a gravel lane — and there they were.
A patch of rainbow in the middle of green. The Alps behind them are still snow-capped. Above everything, a wide, luminous blue sky and light that felt almost apologetic for having been away so long. And the air — cool, crystalline, the sort that makes you stop mid-step just to breathe it.
Psychological and metabolic thriller — blending rigid scientific accuracy with mystical, serialized story. A Mediterranean Diet Series where every meal is a story, and every story feeds something.
For anyone who has ever stood at a stove and felt, without knowing why, that they were not cooking alone.
Episode One
The Jar That Never Emptied
I. The Curve of Coast
The complex sat on a curve of the Peloponnesian coast that had been eating the Mediterranean way for three thousand years before anyone invented the word “diet.”
From the road, it looked modest: twenty whitewashed bungalows arranged in a loose semicircle, the open end of which faced the sea like a cupped hand catching light—a central kitchen with a wood-fired oven that had not gone cold in thirty-seven years. A garden so densely planted with oregano, rosemary, wild thyme, and lemon verbena that the wind coming down from the hills always arrived smelling of a spice rack — or, depending on your state of mind, of a very old apothecary.
And a long, shaded terrace, its limestone floor worn smooth by decades of morning feet, where guests ate breakfast each day at precisely nine o’clock. Breakfast was always the same, give or take the season: fresh tomatoes halved and drizzled with oil, a wedge of feta that the owner’s supplier drove down from a mountain village in Epirus every Thursday, thick slices of sourdough whose crust shattered like fine porcelain, and coffee brewed in a brass briki over a low flame until it foamed exactly twice without boiling over.
The Rise and Hollow Fall of the Frichignono. Much more than just a name in a dusty ledger.
The tunnel does not merely lead you underground; it swallows you.
The vaulted stone ceiling presses down with the weight of a thousand years, the air turning cold and damp — the temperature of a held breath.
Ahead, a dim amber glow flickers; behind you, a darkness so thick and deliberate it feels like a physical presence. You find yourself walking faster. Everyone does. This is where the castle keeps its oldest secrets, and in Castellengo, secrets have a habit of refusing to stay buried.
The stones here have been watching people arrive since the Middle Ages, but they learned a different kind of silence after the Frichignono arrived. As you walk, the echo of your own footsteps begins to drift. The rhythm falters. It’s a classic trick of the acoustics — or perhaps it’s the sound of the fourteen original noble clans who were slowly, methodically bled out of their inheritance to make room for one name.
