Inspiration: discover the Blog

Private itineraries through the Dolomites — the German-Italian Christmas at its most authentic, in the weeks the markets are at their proper register. There is a particular evening in the second week of December at the Christmas market in the small Alto Adige town of Brunico — Bruneck, in the local German — when the snow has begun to fall on the wooden stalls in the central piazza, the mulled wine vendors are running at capacity, the brass quintet from the local conservatory

Alpine heritage, long lunches and the Dolomite peaks — Cortina d'Ampezzo in the season the locals quietly prefer to the winter one. There is a question one occasionally hears, in the bars of Cortina in mid-August, about which of the two seasons the town's regulars actually prefer. The winter answer is the obvious one: this is the most cosmopolitan of the Italian Alpine resorts, the host of the 2026 Winter Olympics, the seat of an Italian society that has wintered here since t

High cuisine, via ferrata and Europe's great Alpine secret — the case for the Italian Alps in the months when most travellers think of the sea. The Italian Dolomites in summer are perhaps the best-kept open secret in European travel. The North Americans who know the Dolomites largely know them as a winter destination; the Italians who know them best go in summer. The reason is simple: the same peaks that in February frame the ski terrain become, between June and September, th

Private chalets, Cortina, and the quiet glamour of Alpine Italy in the months when the peaks are at their most theatrical. There is a sound that the Dolomites make in January, just before dawn, that no other mountain range produces. It is the sound of cold air settling into the bowls between the peaks — a particular silence, more silent than other silences, broken occasionally by the slow creak of a larch branch under snow. To wake in a chalet at altitude in this part of Ital