Italy

It is a long country and a slower one to cross than the map suggests. The high-speed spine from Turin down through Milan, Florence and Rome to Naples is genuinely quick, Rome to Milan in under three hours. Step off that line and the pace halves: Cortina has no railway station at all, and the nearest is a bus ride away at Calalzo di Cadore.

Which makes treating Italy as one trip the standard mistake. Ten days does one axis of the country properly and two of them badly, and the axes run on opposite calendars. The Ligurian and Amalfi coasts are warm enough to swim from May, when the Dolomite high routes are still under snow and the huts have not opened for the season.

August is the month to think hardest about. Italians take their own holiday then, so the cities empty and the coast and the mountains fill, and a good deal of urban Italy shuts for a fortnight around the fifteenth. April to June and September to October are the months that serve both halves of the country, and they are cheaper.

Almost everything worth seeing now has a gate on it, so Italy rewards deciding early. The Vatican Museums and the Uffizi sell out weeks ahead, and the Last Supper admits forty people every fifteen minutes. Venice charges day trippers on about sixty dates a year.