When Michael Bublé follows you to your bedroom, you know you’re staying in the right hotel. Admittedly it was all rather brief. We made a few clumsy stabs at jokes about my pyjamas and rumpled sheets and collected business cards. So we discovered this was his third stay – and mine – at the Belmond … Continued
Arriving in Rome is surreal, gliding past the ancient world in a taxi, the great spectacle of the Colosseum looming down with echoes of sacrificial screams and lion roars. Today, Morgan Freeman is here for a remake of Ben Hur, with Daniel Craig down the road in Bond car chases. Ancient and modern, Rome is … Continued
I visited to the Greek island of Folegandros because I was intrigued by the name (King Minos’ son) and glittering white-cubed Anemi Hater on the slopes above the small port. That’s how most people get there, quite by chance. It only takes one visit to clinch it forever. There are certain places that begin to … Continued
What’s in a name? In the case of Folegandros, history and holiday heaven in equal measure. Folegandros was a son of the great King Minos of Crete. Somehow, down through the years, he gave his name to a little island in the Cyclades — a gem of an outcrop, north-west of fabled Santorini. Most people … Continued
Berlin plays havoc with your emotions. The brutalities of recent history are evident everywhere. Holocaust reminders and memorials, and the subsequent terrors of Communism and the Stasi, are spread among the stones of this intelligent, thinking city. There’s nothing dumbed-down about Berlin. There is a strange mix of creative vitality and the resounding spectre of … Continued
I feel like Virginia Woolf on the Grand Tour, arriving in Rome with Venice and Milan to come. The Eternal City is where Woolf said she would come to die. But nothing really dies in this glorious city of ghosts, where centuries are laid bare across the seven hills. There is the huge Colosseum where … Continued
Afloat in an unchanging landscape, Sharon Feinstein meets up with some old friends to savour the enduring charms of Crete I am eating fresh fish and lovely tomatoes, basking in the warm breeze with a German Shepherd named Marley curled at my feet. We have sailed here on Yanni’s yacht, the Jaquelina, and stopped for … Continued
