Travel, technology, media, politics, rinse, repeat

Every ski season around 490 scheduled flights from the UK land at Caselle, 10 miles north of Turin’s city centre. Charter airlines also use the airport as a jumping-off point for Valdostan resorts like Courmayeur and Cervinia or the Milky Way ski area, and few passengers ever need make the short journey into the city centre.

Which is a shame. Under-rated Turin is northern Italy’s culinary capital, a Wonka-esque paradise for chocolate lovers, home of Europe’s longest-lasting royal house, Catholic Christianity’s holiest relic, and the best collection of Egyptian artefacts outside Cairo.

So, my advice for this winter’s skiers is to book the last flight home (Ryanair’s late Stansted departure is 8.30pm), deposit your bags at the airport early and make the 19-minute train ride into town your first departure of the day.

Read the rest at Timesonline

Statistics can tell us all sorts of things. They can be very complicated. Or they can be simple. But they are best when presented in the raw. So, here, uneditorialised, unedited, in a no-holds-barred list kinda format, are one six-year-old’s marks out of ten for everything-she-could-fit-into-one-weekend-at-Disneyland-Paris. I’ll warn you now, her scoring can be erratic, over-emotional, and downright dubious, but I can assure you it’s honest and it’s authentic.

In the spirit of open data, crunch her numbers however you wish. They are after the fold / below the photo.

[Read more →]

Dalston, De Beauvoir, Shoreditch. Not the standard chapter headings from your London guidebook, to be sure. But if you haven’t visited my city for a few years, here’s the bit you missed: London is moving east.

The tarmac thread that links those three is the Kingsland Road, the Broadway of the East End. A trip along its arrow-straight two miles serves up a United Nations of food influences. Restaurants are generally chaotic, informal, and great value. In other words, a perfect cipher for the waves of immigration that have made this London’s most varied (and, suddenly, most fashionable) cultural quarter.

Read the rest at Frommers.com

Following soon after the release of my Instant Florence app last month, Instant Turin for the iPhone was released into the App Store on the first of this month. It’s my second contribution to the Instant Cities series of travel apps produced by smart start-up Never Odd Or Even (of Ask the Hoff fame).

Once again, we’re hoping that a combination of photo-driven menus, original content, and a keen price (£1.79/$2.99) will be a winner. We certainly think the app is pitched just right for anyone spending a weekend in the capital of Piedmont. Turin is a great (and much under-rated) city, and I hope my love for the place comes across in the app.

If you want to buy Instant Turin, this link opens iTunes and takes you straight to it. If you would like to review the app for your website or publication, then drop me a line and I’ll arrange a review copy for you.

If you’ve used the app and have any comments, then please leave them below. We’re always trying to make better stuff, and feedback really helps.

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.

Despite the nice SEO title, I’m not sure there’s anything especially honest in offering a cure for writer’s block. Being blocked is a natural part of the writing process; it’s ‘organic’, if you like that term. In my experience, it can even preface a flood of creativity.

Still, writer’s block is frustrating, and upgrades itself to unpleasant if it strikes at a time you really need it not to. (The anxiety about being blocked, not just ‘being blocked’, dishes out the real carnage.) So, here are some of the writing strategies I adopt to stop it starting… or if it’s already started, to chase it away.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

1.When I feel the fluidity start to fail, the first thing I do is grab a pen and paper and walk. [Read more →]

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