The city of Braga did not make the final cut of our Portugal itinerary aside from one single sight on the outskirts of the town. The sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte is comparatively young for a religious site – the pilgrimage church dates only from the 17th century, and the current ensemble was fully
The village of Amarante was planned as the end-of-day stop on the return to Porto from Douro Valley – it is conveniently located along the way. Unfortunately, the weather – which was fairly benevolent to us in the first few days of our trip – picked the moment of our arrival in Amarante to turn
There are several properties on the World Heritage list that celebrate historic and famous wine-producing regions. My fairly well-known affinity for wine notwithstanding, I have never managed a visit to one of those sites that would actually revolve around wine. Which made our day-trip to Alto Douro the first of a kind: a wine-tasting trip
The very first adjective to use to describe Porto has to be colorful. Yes, the city has a lot of history and quite a few significant monuments and points of interest – which is the main reason why it as a whole is a World Heritage site – but it’s the color variety of the
Coimbra is the fourth-largest city in Portugal, and its former capital for a bit over a century quite a few centuries ago. As any city over a thousand years old, it is not without charms, but on balance it falls short of making an exceptional impression. It is nice, but no more than that. It
Our itinerary in Portugal was structured around two “hub-and-spokes” legs in Porto and Lisbon. There are roughly 300 kilometers of driving from one to another, with quite a few interesting sights in between. Seeing more than a couple of them requires more than one day. One solution to that would be adding another hub somewhere
This is a pretty recent memory, not even a year old at the time of writing. But it is very illustrative of how the same place can be both most enchanting and most awful, depending on the time of the day. The village of Oia on the northern tip of Santorini island is among the
This is not an exceptional photo but it occupies a special place in my memory. It was opportunistically taken from the upper deck of a bus idling by the Mansion House, looking towards the Royal Exchange. So very iconic British red double-decker is moving across the line of vision. In the background, the conical top
This is one of my all-time favorite photographs. It featured several years ago in one of my essays on Venice and it has a prominent spot in the slider at the top of the blog’s homepage. I am standing on the stern of a Grand Canal vaporetto that is gliding towards Piazza San Marco. It
Spontaneity has not been much of a feature of my traveling exploits lately, but the Christmastime trip to Washington had a bit of spontaneity in it. It was originally conceived as an opportunity for moms to do things with kids, and my participation in that was vague at best. Just a few days before the
I have managed trips to 4 foreign countries over the course of 2018 (Scotland, France, Greece, Italy), of which one was a fairly triumphant first. It continued a curiously stable trend established in the last couple of years (2017, 2016) following a much higher output of 2015. Where it comes to the World Heritage, I
Our November trip to Italy was relatively short, befitting a getaway, and structured around visiting a few places that we had not explored in the past. We spent time in Milan (city highlights, Last Supper), Bergamo (city highlights, fortifications), and Turin (city highlights, royal palaces). My photographic output was not too extensive, but for those
Why did we go to Turin in the first place? If you guessed that in addition to visiting a city that we have not been to before it gave me a chance to add to my roster of visited World Heritage sites, you would be entirely correct. Over a dozen palaces and hunting lodges built
My writing skills being what they are, I frequently struggle with finding original or at least not overused ways to express my positive impressions of places and points of interest. But that is nothing compared to the search for ways to describe a lukewarm impression. The places that do not click with me are never
The city of Bergamo as a whole (covering both the Upper and the Lower City) has been on the tentative World Heritage list for over a dozen years. Although I have already seen a couple of inscribed places less deserving the recognition, in my humble estimation, it feels about right that Bergamo falls short of
We have not set foot in Bergamo in the past and made it a defined target on this trip. It is a kind of town that invariably leaves a positive impression on any visitor without tipping the scales on the exceptional side. Città Alta, the historic core of Bergamo, is a classic, if larger than
Milan, a renowned Mecca of shopping and fashion, is rarely considered to be a sightseeing destination. That reputation is largely deserved, as even the most ardently patriotic locals are likely to agree that their city is not at all pretty. Impressive buildings pop up here or there, some residential streets are lined by fetching rows
I have now come to the end of my photographic material from the summertime trip to Greece. Over the course of a dozen and a half essays, we revisited places on Crete (Minoan sites, Heraklion, Psychro cave, other locations, not forgetting the unbelievable sunrise), on Santorini (Oia, including sunset, and other locations), on other Cycladic
The last ruins that we visited in Greece was Mycenae, the center of the Late Bronze Age civilization that was the main precursor to the classical Ancient Greek culture. Mycenaeans’ period of domination over the Mediterranean came around the time when the Minoan civilization – which we encountered on Crete – had begun its decline
Delphi was the sacred center of the world for the Ancient Greeks and undoubtedly a remarkable achievement of purposeful architecture, a sanctuary built into the challenging landscape to inspire awe and worship. Unfortunately, very little is left of its former glory, and the visual impact is fairly muted. After experiencing grandiosity of the Parthenon at