Syracuse (Siracusa) was for some centuries the most important city in the Mediterranean. Just south of the straits of Messina it held a vital strategic position and the island of Sicily had complete control...

They say the world became smaller when the rail networks were established and it got even smaller when cheap commercial flights became available to all. The digital age brought us the internet and so our...

If you have never seen the TV series "Montalbano" you've been missing a treat. The intuitively brilliant detective played by Luca Zingaretti follows the books by the Italian author Andrea Camilleri. The...

I suppose that you would regard the Milano as a "bijou" Hotel. The room is tiny but well appointed and very comfortable and it is but a stone's throw from the Verona Amphitheatre.  Turn right and, if...

The highway A5 is the road that takes you from Seattle to Portland Oregon and runs more or less straight for some 180 miles. The rental company had upgraded us to an enormous 8 seater GMC; very thirsty,...

Mix the right sort of clay with cobbles, site them where streams and rain will erode it in a geologically short period, sprinkle them with minerals to tint the cake and you get the Clay Cliffs in Omarama,...

Admittedly two of them are pretty small and we barely grazed French territorial waters but when you travel at an average cruising speed of 6 knots (six nautical miles per hour) and you have 400 miles to...

We are templed out, stupaed out, mausoleumed out, mosqued out.

An ancient Stupa is possibly neither a mausoleum nor a temple. Those Stupas were mostly completely solid structures. They did not contain burial chambers nor did they contain caskets of treasure. They...