Inspiration: discover the Blog

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 palazzi, masked galas and the city beyond the crowds, for the traveller who wants Carnival as it was — not as it is performed. The Carnival of Venice is the most photographed event in Italy, and yet the photograph and the event are scarcely the same thing. The photograph is the daylight Carnival of Piazza San Marco — a festival of costumed amateurs, posing for cameras, performed for cameras, and over by sundown. The event itself, the Carnival the Venetians have kept a

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