The first capital of Portugal way back in the 12th century, Guimarães is recognized on the World Heritage list as an authentic example of the…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…