10 reasons to visit Italy in 2025: the best new holidays and cultural events
Walking and cycling tours, family holidays, great places to stay, blockbuster exhibitions and more launching this year
Exploring Siena, Tuscany’s other artistic masterpiece
A major new exhibition at the National Gallery puts the spotlight on the Tuscan town’s artistic heritage. But nothing beats exploring its historic neighbourhoods on foot
A ‘gorgeous medieval’ town in Tuscany and other readers’ tips across Italy
From a Sicilian city brimming with life to serene Dolomite villages, our tipsters share their Italian highlights
Where tourists seldom tread, part 15: three more UK towns with unsung stories
Our tour of unheralded towns continues with Black Country legends in Dudley, Renaissance-style architecture in Enniskillen and Middlesbrough, birthplace of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Sète: the seaside town with year-round sunshine in the south of France
Surrounded by canals, a lagoon and the Mediterranean, the port town has fabulous seafood and some quirky cultural traditions
Merchants of Venice: 10 of the city’s most beautiful historic shops
From an elegant apothercary to a jewellers in a baroque salon, these stores all have atmospheric interiors and a history of exquisite craftsmanship
Mardi Gras the Balkan way – alternatives to Venice carnival
In Croatia, Montenegro and Albania, the legacy of Venetian occupation lives on in a series of spectacular carnivals that these days have a local twist
When in Rome … go where the Romans go, not the tourist crowds
The Eternal City’s monuments and museums are busy at the best of times, but there remain myriad treasures to explore that are well off the beaten track
Alternative wonders: why Yemen’s ancient terraces are a supreme human creation
The soil, treasured for centuries, turns steep Yemini slopes into fertile and productive land. Coffee grown here was served at London’s first coffee house in 1652
Alternative wonders: why the stone citadel of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka is my rock of ages
The landscape is not the dead relic of a foregone age. It is a living reminder of how knowledge tailored to the local ecology is essential
Alternative wonders: why Egypt’s Colossi of Memnon are my giants of history
Emerging from the heat shimmer, these two enormous statues in Luxor appear completely otherwordly – like giants in a wheat field
Alternative wonders: why Tibet’s Samye monastery is my spiritual inspiration
The region’s first Buddhist monastery is a complex of chapels and stupa towers from a vast mandala – a symbolic and spiritual representation of the whole universe
A sprawling megacity of multi-level madness: why Chongqing in China is my wonder of the world
This megacity is like Hong Kong on steroids – a vertically sprawling, astonishing urban phenomenon that can only be understood in three dimensions
Dancing horses and a dodgy Venus: why Derbyshire’s Bolsover Castle is my wonder of the world
This is a very English wonder, fusing the arcane symbolism of northern England with then modern ideas from Renaissance Italy
From a feisty goddess to stone phalluses: why Turkey’s Temple of Artemis is my wonder of the world
The temple was an inspiration for countless Greek and Roman temples that followed and is twice the size of the Parthenon