Sardinia Self-Drive Holiday: The Ultimate Road Trip Guide (2026)
Most visitors to Sardinia stay put. They find a beach, lay out a towel, and don’t move for a fortnight. And while Sardinia’s beaches are genuinely among the finest in Europe, this approach misses almost everything that makes the island extraordinary.
Sardinia is a place of startling contrasts: turquoise sea and grey granite mountains, ancient Bronze Age towers and baroque hilltop towns, fragrant maquis scrubland and bottomless gorges. The only way to see any of it — outside the handful of tourist towns — is by car.
A self-drive holiday in Sardinia is not just the best way to see the island. It is, for most of it, the only way. Here is everything you need to know to do it well.
Best Beaches in Sardinia Off the Beaten Track (2026 Guide)
Sardinia has 1,850 kilometres of coastline. It also has, in July and August, a significant proportion of mainland Italy's entire holiday-making population crammed onto perhaps two hundred kilometres of it. The Costa Smeralda is extraordinary but it is not, in high summer, exactly undiscovered.
The good news is that most of Sardinia's finest beaches are not on the Costa Smeralda. They are on headlands reachable only by a dusty track, at the base of cliffs requiring a forty-minute walk, or in coves that face the wrong direction for Instagram's preferred light. They are, as a result, often nearly empty even in summer.
These are the ones we send our clients to. Most require a car. All of them are worth it.
What to Do in Naples: A 3-Day City Escape Guide (2026)
Naples has a reputation problem. For decades, guide books warned visitors about traffic, chaos and crime. Cautious travellers gave it a wide berth and went straight to the Amalfi Coast, treating Naples as a transport hub rather than a destination.
That is changing — and quickly. Naples is now one of the most talked-about cities in Italy, and for good reason. It has the best street food in the country. It has a historic centre that is genuinely, overwhelmingly extraordinary — a UNESCO World Heritage site of churches, underground ruins and baroque piazzas stacked on top of Greek and Roman layers going back 2,700 years. And it has a proximity to Pompeii, Herculaneum and the island of Procida that makes it one of the most content-rich bases in southern Italy.
Three days is enough to understand why people come back every year. Here is how to spend them.
Best Time to Visit Puglia: A Month-by-Month Guide (2026)
Puglia has no bad months. That is not a promotional line — it is genuinely unusual among Italian regions and one of the things that makes it so bookable year-round. The question is not whether Puglia is worth visiting in any given month, but which version of Puglia you want to experience.
The answer depends on what you are after: beach and sea, food and harvest, driving and walking, festivals and local life. Here is how each season plays out.
Top 10 Food Experiences in Sicily You Can't Miss (2026)
Sicilian food is not just Italian food. It is a separate culinary tradition altogether — shaped by 2,500 years of Arab, Norman, Greek, Spanish and Bourbon influence into something genuinely unlike anything else on the peninsula. The Arab legacy alone — saffron, raisins, pine nuts, caponata, granita, cassata — gives Sicilian cooking a sweet-sour-savoury complexity that is entirely its own.
Any food holiday in Sicily should be built around experiences, not just restaurants. Here are the ten we recommend to every client.
Italy's Most Beautiful Hilltop Towns: Our Local Picks (2026)
Italy has an extraordinary number of them. This is partly geography — a long, thin country of mountains and plains, where hilltops were simply the safest place to build for most of recorded history. And partly history: the medieval period created hundreds of fortified towns that sit, centuries later, on their ridges and cliffs exactly as they were built.
The famous ones — San Gimignano, Orvieto, Montepulciano — are beautiful and worth visiting. They are also, in high season, extremely busy. Here are the ones we send our clients to: the well-known, the underrated, and the genuinely unknown.
Treviso City Escape: Your Complete Weekend Guide (2026)
Treviso has the canals, the frescoed medieval buildings, the fish market on an island in the middle of a river, the osterie with local wine and cicchetti — and almost none of Venice's crowds. It is 30 kilometres from Venice by train and entirely different in atmosphere: a working city that happens to be beautiful, rather than a museum that happens to have residents.
It is also the home of prosecco (the Prosecco DOC hills begin just north of the city), radicchio (the bitter red chicory that turns up in every restaurant in the Veneto), and tiramisù (invented, with some controversy, in Treviso in the 1960s). For a city of 85,000 people, it punches exceptionally hard on food.
A weekend here — ideally as part of a wider Veneto self-drive — is one of the most satisfying short breaks in northern Italy.