It was a mistake to tell us about the gelati-to-sightseeing ratio. This was the formula my father, his younger sister and brother came up with when being dragged round Italian churches as children. The ideal was 3:1, that is: three ice creams for each dreary chiesa. My grandparents thought it should be the other way
I’ve just been given a personal tour of Ninfa by Monty Don. True, I had to share the thinking woman’s TV gardener with a number of others, but I’m convinced his attention was focused solely on me. The occasion was a visit to three outstanding gardens outside Rome — Ninfa, Villa d’Este and Landriana —
Holidays are a welcome chance to lose ourselves between the covers of a book, especially for those of us who struggle to find time to read amid the assorted tyrannies of daily life. So the book that ends up in your suitcase had better be a worthy companion. The disorganised need not fear: you could
Sooner or later, no matter where you are travelling on Italian railways, you are likely to pass through Bologna Centrale. The city is the main junction between the north and south of the country, close to the route through the mountains. It always has been. The teenage Michelangelo stopped off while journeying between Venice and
On Saturday at Mont St Michel, the 103rd edition of the Tour de France begins, and the favourite to win is again British. As a long-term cycling fan, even typing those words gives me a frisson. When I started watching in the 1980s there were few British riders to cheer on — and none challenging
Men don’t look good in black tie. They might think that they look like Sean Connery in Dr No, but they end up looking like David Brent at the Wernham-Hogg annual Christmas do. Black tie doesn’t lend parties glamour; it just makes them depressing. The one good thing about black tie is that it is
Gatton Park is probably Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s least famous landscape. It is tucked away near Reigate Hill, just beyond the M25, and even in the 300th anniversary year of Brown’s birth it is an unlikely place to visit. Because it shares its plot with a school and stables, you can only go on the first
It’s time to scuttle under a rock if you are a Folkestone or Cornish crab: 7,000 of them will be consumed in Royal Ascot week, along with 2,900 lobsters, 160,000 glasses of Pimm’s, 51,000 bottles of champagne and 30,000 chocolate eclairs. Better get your chopper booking in fast, too: 400 helicopters will descend on to
Is there a more forlornly romantic spot in Britain than the moors east of Inverness where the Jacobite dream died? There is surely no more romantic location from which to explore the area than Brodie Castle, a turreted fortress looking out towards the Moray coast. Now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, Brodie Castle
People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome, one of my colleagues developed a callus on her hand where the daily task of locking the museum door — emphatically — caused the key to abrade her skin. And when I
Verdi has a peculiar if not unique place in the pantheon of great composers. If you love classical music at all, and certainly if you love opera, then it is almost mandatory to love him. The great and good of the musical world, the kind of people who sit on the boards of opera houses
Looking at the programme for the feria of San Isidro in Madrid this month (bullfights are being held on 31 consecutive days), it may be hard to believe that there is any threat to the future of the spectacle — it is not a sport — of what in Spain is called la corrida (the
For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith, Laurie, Persephone and Wattie. The last of them, Wattie the gentlest and sweetest of dogs, died a few months ago. We feel bereft. Clumbers are special: beautiful, affectionate, wilful, sometimes difficult, never dull. They take
A year or so ago, I inherited a cardboard box filled with plants. It was an offshoot from an enormous collection that belonged to a young botanist from Stockwell. He was about to be turfed out of the derelict building he lived in and hundreds of plants were being spread across London. I offered to
If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children will not be sensitive types, nor prone to nightmares, but if they can handle a little, or indeed quite a lot, of fantasy, Bosch will blow their tiny minds. My four-year-old lad, Luca, definitely not
It’s 8.57 on a Friday evening and I’m at home, waiting for an obscure American radio talk show to come online. For the next hour I’ll be answering listeners’ love queries with the aid of my Tarot-reading skills, and out of respect to all the lovesick Americans out there I’ve made a real effort to
There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the Hollies and rainy Manchester for Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Laurel Canyon. The LA of beaches, semi-rural hills and freeways can work wonders on an English heart. But the city has another side — a
Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms. He and his assistants kept these in constant use, creating such a judder-ing racket that the poor painter was unable to concentrate on his pictures. Botticelli implored this fellow to reduce the noise, but to
Looking across the wide Neva from Vasilyevsky Island, the Palace Embankment shimmers in the river, suspended between water and sky. Raised on a marsh by violence and sheer force of will, there are few cities more impossible, and more beautiful, than St Petersburg. It’s worth going for the view alone, and you should — now,
Some rogue has been writing in my bedside book. A fastidious hand has crossed out misspelled words and written neat pencil corrections in the margin. ‘Dennis’ has become ‘Denis’, quotations have been reattributed and dates amended. More than one book scribbler has been at it. At times, the pedantic pencil becomes a biro, thrilled to
