In the summer of 1831, the inhabitants of the Sicilian town of Sciacca began to notice something deeply unsettling. The ground trembled, the sea behaved strangely and the air filled with the unmistakable smell of sulphur. Sailors reported columns of…
Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that your village no longer belongs to any country. There is no king above you, no pope collecting your taxes, no foreign governor issuing orders and no customs officer asking questions about the…
Standing alone on a hill in the Puglian countryside, Castel del Monte is one of Italy’s most recognizable and enigmatic medieval monuments. Its pale limestone walls rise above the fields of the Murge plateau, forming a perfect geometric shape that…
There is a place on Lake Iseo where the mountains do not simply rise behind the water. They plunge directly into it. Great slabs of pale limestone stand almost vertically along the shore, trees grow from narrow cracks in the…
At first sight, it hardly seems possible that this water belongs to an Italian river. Its intense turquoise colour recalls a tropical lagoon, while its extraordinary clarity reveals stones, plants and submerged structures beneath the surface. Yet this place is…
There are castles built on hills, castles hidden in forests and castles overlooking ancient cities. Then there is Le Castella, a fortress that appears to rise directly from the turquoise waters of the Ionian Sea. Seen from the shore, its…
Puglia is famous for whitewashed villages, ancient olive trees, conical trulli and towns that seem to have been carved directly from pale limestone. Yet only a short distance from Bari, there is a place that breaks almost every rule. Its…
Imagine driving through the familiar Tuscan countryside, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees and Renaissance villas. Everything looks exactly as expected until, behind a thick curtain of trees, something completely improbable appears. Onion-shaped domes rise above the forest, red…
It rises above the forests of the Bolognese Apennines like an architectural hallucination. Medieval towers stand beside Moorish arches, onion-shaped domes appear above walls of grey stone and red brick, and staircases twist through rooms that seem to belong to…
In the middle of a peaceful lake in Piedmont, surrounded by mountains and small villages reflected in the water, there is an island so compact that it can be explored in less than an hour. Yet its history stretches back…