Off the Beaten Path Travel Destinations in Italy
Cipolla rossa mornings above Santa Maria dell’Isola in Tropea Tropea sits on a sandstone cliff above the Tyrrhenian, the whole centro storico balanced on a shelf of rock. Below, pale sand runs toward the outcrop that holds Santa Maria dell’Isola, the small sanctuary that looks from the belvedere like a church set on a loaf … Read more
Cosenza starts where two rivers run into each other. Stand near the old town, and you can watch the Busento slide into the Crati, a gray-green join that still shapes how the city feels. Above the water, the centro storico climbs Colle Pancrazio in stairs, laundry lines, and stone patched more times than anyone counts. … Read more
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