Turin wears its elegance with understatement. Wide arcades line the boulevards, protecting pedestrians from rain and sun as they walk past baroque palaces and cafe terraces. This city was Italy first capital and its grand architecture reflects that regal past. The Mole Antonelliana rises above the rooftops, a towering museum of cinema that has become […]
Český Krumlov is one of the most beautiful small towns in Europe, a UNESCO World heritage jewel in southern Bohemia, encircled by a dramatic horseshoe bend of the Vltava River, whose perfectly preserved medieval and Renaissance centre is dominated by the sprawling, multi-coloured Krumlov Castle, the second-largest castle complex in the Czech Republic after Prague […]
Categories: Czech Republic, Sights, Sights
Loket Castle is one of the Czech Republic’s most dramatically situated medieval fortresses, a 12th-century Gothic castle perched on a granite rock surrounded on three sides by the Ohře River, in the charming little town of Loket near Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia. With its well-preserved medieval interiors, gruesome torture chamber exhibition, and a famous […]
Categories: Czech Republic, Sights, Sights
London does not introduce itself politely. It hits you with the roar of the Tube, the scent of street food drifting from Borough Market, the sudden grandeur of a royal palace appearing at the end of an ordinary street. This city has been a global capital for over a thousand years and every century has […]
Categories: Cities, Sights, Sights, United Kingdom
The island of Mont Saint-Michel rises from the bay like a vision from another century. Its pointed spire and granite walls stand against the sky while the tide races in across the sand at the speed of a galloping horse. For over a thousand years pilgrims have crossed this bay to reach the abbey that […]
Categories: Cities, France, Mountains, Nature, Sights, Sights
Neuschwanstein Castle is the most famous fairy-tale castle in the world, the soaring Romanesque Revival fantasy of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, perched dramatically on a rocky Alpine outcrop above the village of Hohenschwangau, whose turrets, towers, and white limestone walls inspired Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle and have become the single most iconic image […]
The city of Elche in southern Alicante province holds a UNESCO World heritage site that is entirely unique in Europe: a network of over 200,000 date palms covering 144 agricultural plots across 500 hectares, a Moorish irrigation system still in use today, and a claim to be the largest palm grove in Europe, rivalled only […]
Categories: Sights, Spain, Wellness, Relax & Sports
Prague is a city of more than one hundred spires, nine historic districts, over 1,000 years of continuous urban development, and the sixth most visited city in Europe, receiving approximately 8 million tourists annually, a figure that has grown steadily since the fall of the Iron Curtain made this impossibly beautiful city accessible to the […]
Categories: Czech Republic, Sights, Sights
Slovakia has 180 registered castles and ruins, more per capita than almost any European country, and Krásna Hôrka may be the most perfectly preserved of them all, a hilltop fortress near Roʒava that was never conquered, never destroyed, and survived intact from the 14th century until a devastating fire in 2012. The castle sits on […]
Levoča is one of Slovakia’s most precious heritage towns, a remarkably preserved medieval trading city in the Spiš region whose Church of St. James houses the tallest wooden altar in the world (18.62 metres), a masterpiece of late Gothic carving by the legendary Master Paul of Levoča that is, astonishingly, 500 years old and still […]
