Inspiration: discover the Blog

Venice, Florence, Cortina — a curated guide to the closing night of the year, for clients who have asked us where in Italy is the right place to spend it. We are asked, in late September each year, by perhaps a dozen of our most established clients, the same question: where in Italy is the right place to spend New Year's Eve. The question is more interesting than it first appears, because the Italian Capodanno is not, in any meaningful sense, a single tradition. It is a serie

Como, Garda and Maggiore for the discerning traveller — a frank guide to a region that most international visitors meet only through one of its three faces. There is a tendency among visitors to Italy to speak of the Italian Lakes as though they were a single phenomenon — a region, a shared character, an experience that one chooses simply by deciding to spend a few days at altitude on water. They are not. The three major lakes — Como, Garda and Maggiore — are each genuinely d

Why the connoisseur's month is booked a year in advance — and what the experienced Italian traveller has come to expect from these particular weeks. Among the small private agreements that the experienced Italian traveller makes with the year, the most important is, in our view, the agreement about September. The agreement is that nothing else in the calendar will be allowed to interfere with it. School schedules, board meetings, the late summer demands of family life — these

Navigating the coast without the crowds — a working strategy for the most heavily visited weeks on the most heavily photographed coastline in Europe. There is a moment, around eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in mid-July, when the Piazzetta in Capri reaches its annual condition of structural impossibility. The funicular has just delivered another six hundred passengers from Marina Grande. The four cafés around the square are at capacity. The narrow shopping streets that rad

The case for January in Rome, Florence and Venice — when the cities reveal themselves to those who know how to read them. There is a photograph that hangs in the office of a friend of ours, a Roman architect, taken on the morning of the third of January some years ago. It shows the Pantheon at first light — empty, just empty, the great rotunda holding nothing but a single oblique shaft of winter sun falling through the oculus onto wet travertine. He framed it because he said