Venice

Venice hardly needs any introduction, famed as it is throughout the world as a city of incomparable beauty, romance and artistic wealth.  Built on mudbanks which extend into the tidal waters of the Adriatic where East meets West, Venice was once a great maritime power ruled by its doges, and a place of plot, intrigue and decadence.  A city of water and of light, with an atmosphere which is at once fascinating and distrubing, its fragile fabric of canals and palazzi, churches, alleyways and campi has somehow survived the threats of both flood and mass tourism, and remarkably little has changed throughout the centuries.  Nowhere in Venice will you see an ugly sight;  even the Macdonalds near the Rialto is just about bearable. 

At any time of the year you can escape the crowds of tourists who throng Piazza San Marco, the Rialto and the main thoroughfare between the two by simply slipping into the backstreets where there is always a church, a canal, or a cafe to divert you; the best time to visit, however, is in spring and early summer or autumn, when the crowds are thinner and the weather can be lovely.  During 1997, for example, there was a long spell of warm weather and blue skies in March, while June was often wet and overcast.

Vento & Trentino-Alto Adige

Stretching inland from Venice in a great arc as far as the Austrian border to the north and the shores of Lake Garda to the west is the province of Veneto.  While the landscape of the vast Veneto Plain which fans out behind Venice is largely industrialized and pancake flat (safe for the green Euganean Hills and Berici Mountains), it is full of interest.  The great cities of Padua, Treviso, Vicenza and Verona are time-consuming enough, but then there are the villas of Palladio and other attractions such as the charming little towns of Asolo and Montagnana.  To the west of venice, the Plain edges into the province of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, curving round the coastline towards Trieste and the border with Slovenia and , to the north, reaching into the high Alps and the border with Austria.

The presence of the mountains gives this region a rich flavour and makes the range of accommodation contained in it, from Venetian palazzo to Tyrolean chalet, wonderfully varied.  The mainly mountainous province of Trentino-Alto Adige, which stretches north from Lake Garda, feels a million miles away from Venice.  As the mountains rise towards the Austrian border, the distinction between the two countries becomes blurred.  Here in this northernmost region of Italy, also known as Southern Tyrol, you will find that the people are German-speaking (all the place names have both German and Italian translations) and that they share the same culture and traditions as their neighbors over the border.  The hospitality is warm, the scenery is breathtakingly beautiful, often with the jagged peaks of the Dolomites serving as a dramatic backdrop.  In winter you can ski and in summer you can walk.  It would be hard to imagine a more delightful and varied holiday than to start in the Southern Tyrol, descend to the serene shores of Lake Garda ( in the province of Lombardia), then cut across the Veneto Plain taking in Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and finally reach the greatest glory of all, Venice itself.