Famous gardens are often places of unparalleled enchantment. As you move through the grounds, your prevalent feeling is the desire to linger in each nook and cranny for ever and ever, to let the sculpted harmony of nature and architecture immerse you in their alternate reality of serenity and surpassing…
Edinburgh is a town after my own heart, a vibrant place full of eye-catching architecture. As our point of entry (and exit) on the whisky trip, it was a not-to-miss destination. I am again left to lament the brevity of our stay in town – a single afternoon – but…
My high-school history curriculum included something on the Utopians of 18th-19th centuries, and although I could no longer recall the particulars the name of Robert Owen was definitely familiar to me. So it was not only for opportunistic reasons that I planned a visit to New Lanark on our journey…
I expect to be entirely opportunistic and non-discriminating in my pursuit of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the foreseeable future. If I am in the vicinity of one with time to spare, I intend to visit it, regardless of what it represents. Which I now understand can throw up a…
This serial UNESCO World Heritage site contains 14 properties, all inscribed together in 2013. We have visited a single one among them and it was in 2008, which makes it one of more borderline entries on my personal roster. The villas and gardens are recognized for the ground-breaking ways they…
As with a couple of other grand churches, we specifically targeted Cologne Cathedral as a stop of interest on our first journey around Germany. One of the most impressive Gothic churches in the Christendom, it is recognized on the UNESCO list both for what it represents artistically and as a…
Of the four properties listed in this UNESCO World Heritage site we can claim reasonable familiarity with two. As unabashed lovers of medieval castles that we are, we planned on seeing at least one of the group of castles in Northern Wales as a definite part of our itinerary when…
I first visited Greenwich Park and climbed up to the Royal Observatory on a business trip to London in 2000. A few years into that decade, as we officially resided within the borders of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, this World Heritage site became the one we undoubtedly visited most…
My very first visit to London, nearly 15 years ago, happened sometime before we started travelling extensively abroad, which explains London’s sites’ relatively early sequential numbers on my World Heritage roster. On that week-long business trip I ended up with sufficient spare time to check out main attractions of the…
I love Barcelona nearly unconditionally and it contests with Paris and Rome the title of a European city that I know best aside from London. It has a lot to offer to any type of visitor but works of Antoni Gaudà are likely to feature on every itinerary, however brief…
We visited Toledo twice on day-trips several years apart and definitely left some places unexplored there even after two visits. Recognizing two millennia of history on display in Toledo, the UNESCO inscription mentions over a dozen sights by name, of which we can claim good familiarity with no more than…
Our single day-trip to Avignon during our very first voyage to France ended up one of the best days of that itinerary. The tour of the Papal Palace took nearly three hours and exhausted us a little, so we shortened our sightseeing program, leaving quite a few hours until our…
The Royal Palace and Monastery of El Escorial attracts quite a bunch of superlatives on its UNESCO description, including an awestruck passage of “there is nothing [about it] that is not exceptional”. In my subjective view, all of those are well deserved. El Escorial is an architectural wonder of the…
In an interesting dissonance, Brussels never figures on the list of must-see destinations and yet there are three separate World Heritage sites within its greater boundaries. The grandest of them all – appropriately named Le Grand-Place – is definitely worth the visit to the Belgian capital. The inscription pays respects…
Having had been introduced to Versailles through the works of Alexandre Dumas before I reached my teens, and having had visited modelled-on-Versailles Peterhof in the years before emigration, I had the Sun King’s palace on my must-visit list for our very first trip to France nearly a decade and a…
In what feels like ages ago but is merely a matter of less than two decades, we were recent American immigrants still awaiting naturalization and possessing decidedly limited financial means. In those prehistoric times, our travel journeys were few and far in between and normally limited to north-American locations where…
Amalfi Coast is up there near the top on the list of destinations that we fell in love with and are overdue to come back to. It’s gorgeous, unique and inviting. It left memories worth recounting. And we simply spent too little time there. The UNESCO inscription recognizes the region’s…
Pont du Gard was chronologically the very first Roman site that we laid our eyes upon. I cannot help but repeat my customary refrain about being in love with architectural masterpieces, and the ones that survive comparatively intact for 2,000 years get an additional dose of my admiration. Itinerary for…
This series of posts gives me an incentive to review our photographic archives with sometimes rather pleasing results. For instance, our visit to Pompei made in the pre-digital photo-era customarily left just a few photographs to choose from. Printed on glossy paper, those 4×6 shots have been languishing in a…
On any given trip, if your plan is to explore an area with multiple destinations over the course of a few days, you probably pick one of those destinations as your base. Then, it becomes a balancing act to get all of your planned sightseeing around the area while doing…