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.
Matera at night -- the Sassi cave city illuminated against the Gravina gorge -- offers one of the most dramatic nocturnal urban landscapes in southern…
Procida, the smallest island in the Gulf of Naples, offers colorful fishing harbours, exceptional seafood, and an island life not yet reshaped by international tourism.
Civita di Bagnoregio -- the dying city on a volcanic tufa plateau connected by a single pedestrian bridge -- is one of the most dramatic…
The Venetian lagoon is not an approach to Venice but the thing itself. Murano, Burano, Torcello, and the quieter islands reveal a world the main…
Basilicata holds Matera and its Sassi, but also ghost towns, Pollino wilderness, Vulture wine country, and a food tradition built on making little extraordinary.
South of Amalfi lies Cilento: wilder cliffs, emptier beaches, cleaner water, and the food tradition that defined the Mediterranean diet. Here is why it matters.
Molise is Italy's least-visited region — and that's precisely what makes it worth visiting. A guide to the landscape, food, and villages of this overlooked…
The ancient cave city of Matera — inhabited continuously for 9,000 years, abandoned in shame in the 1950s, and resurrected as a European Capital of…
Beyond the famous Cinque Terre, Liguria hides a constellation of medieval villages perched on clifftops and buried in fragrant forests — places where time has…