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,…
As is always the case on our family travels, should you have been following my lovely wife on social media you would have known by…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is a curious specimen on the World Heritage list. It is not altogether unremarkable, but also not in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Three geographically dispersed monasteries in Greece are inscribed together on the World Heritage list as the great examples of the golden age of Byzantine art.…
I always find myself awed by grandiose edifices. Beholding the Parthenon up close, unfailingly grandiose despite its ruined state blended with a construction site, made…
Common wisdom holds Athens as a single-day destination, with one must-see sight and little else beyond that which is exceptional. Its abundance of ancient ruins…