Category — Travel

If you love Renaissance art, a trip to the Uffizi is a no-brainer. In no other world museum is time so tangible. Walking from room to room, you’ll see painting transform itself from the Gothic of Andrea Orcagna and Lorenzo Monaco through the High Renaissance of Botticelli and Michelangelo to the 16th-century Mannerism of Pontormo and Andrea del Sarto.

Alas, however, thanks to the wheeze of bolting on compulsory entrance to temporary exhibitions, a ticket now costs €10 with a €4 booking fee (essential if you want to dodge a biblical queue) on top. Ouch.

Tickets to the Accademia, Michelangelo’s marble showcase, work the same. The churches of Santa Croce and San Lorenzo, for exemplars of Brunelleschi‘s chapel architecture, are €5 and €3.50 respectively. Even the Dominican church (€2.70) and cloisters (€2.70) of Santa Maria Novella, home of frescoes by Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s teacher) and Uccello, charge visitors to enter.

Add all that together and a long day touring Florence’s marquee museums and churches could relieve you of almost €40 a head – before you’ve browsed one gift shop. To enjoy the greatest artists in the world, admittedly. Whose work you couldn’t possibly see, in a city as notoriously pricey as Florence, for free.

Or could you?

Read the rest in The Times

The first of three iPhone apps I’ve authored has just been approved by Apple. Instant Florence, co-created with the exceedingly smart folk at Never Odd Or Even, went on sale a few days ago.

Anyone familiar with travel apps on the iPhone knows that there are a daunting number of competitors for our new app, and writing for a startup means there’s almost no cash for marketing. Happily, most of what’s out there uses unoriginal text scraped from Wikitravel and given a shiny custom coat. Ours is original content researched and written from scratch (and also has a shiny coat). Some have been created from the bones of books. Ours has only ever been an app; it’s a square peg designed for a square hole. We think that tailoring the content to its function gives us an advantage in a crowded market. If you’re looking for a photo- and menu-driven guide to the city of the Renaissance, we think Instant Florence is the best product in the App Store. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you have any questions or comments about the app, do get in touch. If you want to buy Instant Florence, this link opens your iTunes account. And watch this space. There’s more coming soon.

Below are two screenshots from the app. Feel free to use them.

A short roundup of some bits and pieces that have run while I’ve been away in Italy.

Not downloaded a travel podcast yet? Then perhaps it’s time you did – choice and quality have increased massively over the past few years and the best of them are very useful indeed, not to mention free. The following are my pick of this summer’s crop.

Read about them at Telegraph.co.uk

No matter how many times I travel to Tuscany, each visit teaches me something new. One welcome find this year is that accommodation prices have remained static, or even dipped, compared to 2008. Offering to pay in advance might secure a further reduction, making one of Italy’s most multifaceted regions still more affordable. Here are some more insights that may surprise you.

Read “5 Things You Don’t Know About Tuscany” at Frommers.com

There are times when you travel and want to stay connected, and times when you don’t. Or, at least, that’s what I hear… I haven’t done much of the second kind of travel lately, so my Nokia N95 is the first thing I pack.

Read “Travel Essentials… my Nokia N95″ at the travelintelligence.com blog

Though he claimed to be writing the history of all Italian art, Vasari knew what side his pasta was oiled on: he was a Florentine first, a Tuscan second, and everything else a distant last. Despite the fact that many of the works he describes are now lost, there’s still no one better to guide you around the art and artists of the Tuscan Renaissance.

Read “Ten Books to Take to Tuscany” at travelintelligence.com

Imagine how much better your guidebook would be if it knew exactly where you were as you read it, what time of day it was and your interests. Welcome to the world of the app.

An “app” (short for application) is basically a program designed to perform a task. You use them already: your word-processor is an app, so is your internet browser. Now the smartphone – mobile phones that do a whole lot more than make calls – has put the app into your pocket.

For travellers the app is big news.

Read the rest at Telegraph.co.uk.

First there was Flashdance, then there were flash mobs, now there are flash sales, where goods are offered at massive discounts for a limited period. The concept began in the high-street stores in an effort to galvanise consumer spending, but it lends itself perfectly to travel, too, and companies are starting to offer their own flash sales, with special deals available for anything from 15 minutes to a fortnight. Some of this summer’s deals promise huge savings – but blink, or at least, go and make a cup of tea, and you could miss out.

Read the rest at Telegraph.co.uk

Up in Italy’s highlands they still know how to make their own fun. Last night’s local sports bulletin featuring fiolet, rebatta and tzan hinted at a taste for the bizarre. Not for Valdostans a convenience–sport diet of Monday night football or cricket on the green.

But then the people of the Valle d’Aosta are a parochial bunch: these 120,000 mountain–dwellers secured an autonomy agreement and live under their own government. Stop in for a bite and you’ll clock some very un–Italian dishes on the menu—does your local trattoria serve Fontina cheese and cabbage soup?

Read the rest at Perceptive Travel.

It’s more immediate than blogging, less frivolous than Facebook, more social than SMS or instant messaging – and suddenly it’s everywhere. Sometimes known as micro-blogging, Twitter is simple: write what you like in up to 140-character chunks, then send it to everyone in your network.

But it is far more than simply an outlet for those with a dubious compulsion to share. Twitter has already broken major news stories, for example. Indians caught up in November’s Mumbai attacks tweeted (that’s the verb) well ahead of news media.

Now it’s being taken up by business, and travel is in the vanguard.

Read the rest at Telegraph.co.uk.

Then ‘How to set up your Twitter account‘.

And if you’re interested in travel, try my recommended ‘50 great travel tweeters‘.

(Also ran in print in the Sunday Telegraph, 22 February.)

Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. [Read more →]

Gordon Ramsay’s York and Albany, 127–129 Parkway, Camden, London NW1

Tel. 020 7388 3344

Set lunch menu: £18

Main courses: £14–18

There are many Saturdays when I can’t afford to lunch at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, and last Saturday was yet another of those. Because, and let’s get this straight up-front, the York and Albany isn’t a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. Not really. The “Patron Chef” is Angela Hartnett, Ramsay’s talented right-hand-cook, but quite what an Executive/Patron Chef actually does isn’t always clear to me. I picture her getting a menu faxed through every now and then, scrawling “fine” on the bottom and faxing it back to Head Chef, Colin Buchan. But then I’m a cynic.

Chicken with foie gras and chicken liver parfait

[Read more →]

It was announced this week that my second guidebook, co-written with Stephen Keeling, has been judged Best Guidebook 2008 at the ENIT Travel Writing Awards. Obviously, we’re chuffed to bits to have impressed the panel of Italian tourism experts, and to have beaten so many other fantastic new guidebooks. The new goal is for my next book, due out next year, to win the 2009 prize.

There’s more on the announcement here:

The winning Frommer’s title written by authors Donald Strachan and Stephen Keeling was singled out for the quality of its research, writing and opening up a new area in Italian tourism.