We've spent the last couple of weeks travelling around some of the towns of northern Italy – Trieste, Livorno, Rimini, Padua and Treviso. Not the usual haunts of tourists (except Italians).
Milan and Turin are too damned large to stay in, so we have avoided them. The other big names – Florence, Pisa and Venice we did as day trips because they are much more expensive, and we could cover what we wanted in a day fairly easily.
The towns we have been in are nicely different in small ways. Rimini is really just a beach town, with a huge strip for dozens of kilometers of hotels along the beaches. Along with the Lido outside Venice it really invented the sea bathing and beach holidays we take for granted today.
Being European beaches they are largely umbrellas along the sea front, but what I haven't really seen before which was (very popular) courts for beach volleyball, beach football and beach tennis in private beach areas.
Padua and Treviso, which are quite close to each other, are old walled towns full of arcades and cobbled streets and surrounded by river moats but still manage to be different. Padua is much bigger and was much wealthier, so has much more extensive walls and is packed with absolutely enormous churches, with loads of important relics.
Treviso, doesn't have canals or rivers used for navigation like the rest, but has lots of water flowing through that seems to have been used for mills and power.
Trieste is Italian now, but resembles the cities of the Dalmation coast on which it is situated in most ways. It was also, surprisingly full of brutalist architecture.
Livorno is quite small and cut by wide canals, and definitely won't become a major tourist destination (we struggled to even find the entrance to the nice "old fort" because it was completely unlabeled and you have to walk through the industrial port to get to it). It does have some beaches popular with locals though, and was always intended largely as our base for Pisa and Florence anyway.
So that's where we've been staying. It's been nice being in smaller towns without the crowds and the omnipresent tourist shops of the big sites. It's also been good to see things that are new and we hadn't heard of before.
Next time the day trips to the places you will know somewhat better.
Milan and Turin are too damned large to stay in, so we have avoided them. The other big names – Florence, Pisa and Venice we did as day trips because they are much more expensive, and we could cover what we wanted in a day fairly easily.
The towns we have been in are nicely different in small ways. Rimini is really just a beach town, with a huge strip for dozens of kilometers of hotels along the beaches. Along with the Lido outside Venice it really invented the sea bathing and beach holidays we take for granted today.
Being European beaches they are largely umbrellas along the sea front, but what I haven't really seen before which was (very popular) courts for beach volleyball, beach football and beach tennis in private beach areas.
Rimini seafront
Padua and Treviso, which are quite close to each other, are old walled towns full of arcades and cobbled streets and surrounded by river moats but still manage to be different. Padua is much bigger and was much wealthier, so has much more extensive walls and is packed with absolutely enormous churches, with loads of important relics.
Side view of Padua's Basilica, which is absolutely over the top, inside and out.
At the back, behind the trees is a side chapel for all the relics.
Treviso, doesn't have canals or rivers used for navigation like the rest, but has lots of water flowing through that seems to have been used for mills and power.
Trieste is Italian now, but resembles the cities of the Dalmation coast on which it is situated in most ways. It was also, surprisingly full of brutalist architecture.
Montegrisa pilgrimage chapel on a hill outside Trieste,
which we made our own little pilgrimage to, albeit an architectural one.
Livorno is quite small and cut by wide canals, and definitely won't become a major tourist destination (we struggled to even find the entrance to the nice "old fort" because it was completely unlabeled and you have to walk through the industrial port to get to it). It does have some beaches popular with locals though, and was always intended largely as our base for Pisa and Florence anyway.
So that's where we've been staying. It's been nice being in smaller towns without the crowds and the omnipresent tourist shops of the big sites. It's also been good to see things that are new and we hadn't heard of before.
Next time the day trips to the places you will know somewhat better.
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