Off the Beaten Path Travel Destinations in Italy
Scanno hangs on a slope above the Sagittario valley: white stone, stairs, arches, narrow doors that never bother announcing themselves. You leave the lake road, climb into the centro, and the air thins a little. Shutters stay half closed at midday. An old woman in black wool crosses a piazza with a shopping bag and … Read more
You hear the water before you see the faces. Down in Borgo Rivera, where L’Aquila slips toward the Aterno, the Fontana delle 99 Cannelle wraps three sides of a small square in pink and white stone. Masks spit thin streams into a long trough. Some look almost human. Others look like half-remembered animals. A few … Read more
Most people enter Valle d’Aosta the way the valley wants them to: fast. The A5 slides past vineyards and factory roofs, and somewhere between Piedmont and Aosta the rock walls close in. Look up and a fort sits on a boulder like a grey ship that never left port. That is Bard. The village … Read more
Most of Sardinia greets you with granite, cork forest, or a castle on a rock. Arborea does none of that. You peel off the SS 131 near Marrubiu, and the roads go straight. Canals run beside the fields. Low houses sit in green rectangles. After a week of hill towns and cliffs, the flat can … Read more
Bernalda does not open with a grand square or a cliff-edge panorama. It opens with a long, tree-lined street. Corso Umberto I runs through the upper town like a spine: noble façades from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, small shops, bars where the same people show up at the same hour. Walk it slowly. … Read more
Most visitors treat Sirmione as the castle at the throat of the peninsula and a queue for thermal water. I walk the other way: past the last gelato windows, onto the rising path where the land narrows and the olive trees take over. San Pietro in Mavino sits up there, a small stone church older … Read more