Italy is a very strange place if you don’t understand it and it starts to make sense to you the more time you spend there. I found Italians to be spontaneous and practical – traits that make their run-down cities function and adapt despite poor maintenance of public facilities. All Read more…
Campione is entirely surrounded on all four sides by Switzerland so there is no immigration control between this enclave and Switzerland, just like the German enclave of Büsingen am Hochrhein. Before January 1, 2020, Campione was in the customs union of Switzerland and enjoyed no customs tariffs, but since then Read more…
Traveling between Chur in Switzerland and Tirano in Italy, the 156km trip takes over 4 hours to complete. The reason why buses can run this route faster than the train is that the Bernina Express is the only train route to traverse over the alps and not under it. There Read more…
Right on the border with Switzerland, the little town of Tirano depends on tourists flowing from Switzerland to keep its economy afloat. In fact, there’s a Swiss railway station that serves as the starting point of the Bernina Express right in the centre of town. The urban centres of Tirano Read more…
Domodossola isn’t really too much of a tourist town so Milan is the first real Italian city I’ve visited and it is…quite Italian. The 4th century churches, gothic architecture, dirty metro, liberal traffic flows, and “free” trams are just some of the highlights of the city. There are so many Read more…