In a country where everyone owned a Dacia, my dad decided to buy an Oltcit. In a country where everyone learned to drive on said Dacia, I maneuvered a clunky black Audi, and yes it looked like a goddamn hearse (and felt like one, and it was only through the mercy of God, and none…
Category: Italy
A Chessboard with Perfect Coffee: Turin Guide Part Two
What to see. The best starting point to an exploration of Turin is to just simply set off and wander along its expansive network of colonnades- while many Italian cities treat visitors to fancy porticos, Turin has a whopping 18 kilometres of them, of which 12 are interconnected, thus being perfect shelters from the scorching…
Northwestern Promises- Turin Guide Part One
People usually question my sanity (perhaps I should have put a full stop here, but never mind) when I tell them that Turin is my favourite Italian city. But surely you could have gone for a sexier choice, something like Rome with every bit of it designed by none else than Michelangelo (and buses on…
The Sea is on the Other Side: Genova for the Clueless
The first reason for our presence in Genova on a pleasant spring day was as straightforward as it was silly: it is close to Turin. Actually, most major towns in Northern Italy are close to at least a couple of other potentially interesting locations, often at distances of around 150 kilometres, which in Trenitalia language…
Best of 2016- Travels
Besides being a retrospective of where we’ve traveled to in these past twelve months, this will also try to be one of those useful travel advice posts, just in case any of you decides to follow in our footsteps in the twelve months to come. Sightseeing. It’s probably a common place, but if you’re in…
The Meaning of Everywhere: Trieste
Jan Morris’s book about Trieste is entitled the Meaning of Nowhere, and since I am yet to read it, I cannot necessarily elaborate on why, nor can I disagree with anything therein contained. The only thing I can say for sure is that upon arrival in Trieste I felt something which is either the complete…
Barlove: Caffé San Marco
These days cities are awash with coffee shops, brew bars, specialty coffee houses and the likes, many of which function as so-called ‘coffices’, spaces where people engage in all sorts of mostly laptop based work alongside their espressos, flat whites and chatter. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to complain of such places…
Gods, Aubergines and The Volcano- Sicilian Holiday Part Three
Some years ago I reached the breaking point where I had read about all the Scandinavian crime literature a sane human being can handle and decided to venture onto pastures new. Since Scandinavian poetry seemed to be somewhat taxing, I stayed with the crimes, but went for more sub-tropical ones, namely the books of Sicilian…
Eternal Confusion of the Infinite Bus- Sicilian Holiday Part Two
First things first: because we are inept travelers who love their pint or three of something, we generally skip the hire a car part, which, as you shall see, is particularly irksome in Sicily. This also implies that our mobility is somewhat limited by the quirks and whims of local transportation companies, and we therefore cover less of…
Into the South- Sicilian Holiday Part One
It might seem odd, but for a country which is, insert super useful info here, a peninsula, I had never associated Italy with the sea. Or, more precisely, the sea was never the first thing I associated it with, nor the second, and probably not even the tenth. Somewhere in my heart of hearts I…
