Not a list of places that have been called hidden gems so often they no longer are. What this section actually contains: the hill town in the Marche that has the same density of medieval architecture as San Gimignano and a tenth of the visitors. The trattoria in a Palermo courtyard that has no website and no reviews and a handwritten menu that changes daily. The stretch of Calabrian coastline where the water is the same colour as Positano and the beach has no sunbeds. The wine region in Friuli that produces bottles that sell out in Berlin and are unknown twenty kilometres away in Trieste.Italy is large enough and layered enough that genuine under-visited places still exist — you just have to know which questions to ask. This section is edited by people who actually went there, in the off-season, without a photographer, and found it worth writing about.
Most people come to Italy with a list. Florence. The Amalfi Coast. Lake Como. Venice. And those places are beautiful, iconic even. But there is…
The volcanic plateau north of Rome is one of Italy's most archaeologically dense landscapes — and one of the least visited. A guide to the…
The sassi of Matera are only the beginning. Basilicata's rupestrian landscape extends for hundreds of kilometres through the region's interior — cave churches carved from…
The Tremiti Islands sit in the Adriatic forty kilometres north of the Gargano peninsula. They receive a fraction of the visitors that the Aeolian or…
Pentedattilo — Five Fingers — takes its name from the rock formation on which it sits: a five-pronged peak rising from the Calabrian hills above…
Beneath Orvieto Gothic cathedral lies a subterranean city of Etruscan cisterns, medieval olive presses, and tunnels carved into volcanic tufa over two thousand years.
Sardinia Costa Verde holds Europe largest active dune system at Piscinas, abandoned mining heritage, and the most undeveloped stretch of coastline on the island.
Pitigliano rises from a volcanic tufa spur in the Maremma -- a cliff town with Etruscan roots, a Jewish quarter known as Little Jerusalem, and…
Trieste, once the Habsburg Empire principal port, is Italy most Central European city -- a place of historic caffe culture, literary heritage, and a borderland…
The abandoned villages of the Ligurian Apennines preserve centuries of dry-stone terracing and vernacular architecture in a landscape slowly reclaimed by chestnut forest.