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The Swiss village of Rivaz, overlooking Lake Geneva.

S PA I N SWITZERLAND GREECE THE FRENCH RIVIERA S I C I LY T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

THE ENDEAVOR YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WANTED. OR MAYBE YOU DID.

DRIVING YOU BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION. I’LL HELP YOU REACH FAR OFF PLACES. AND CREATE MEMORIES YOU'LL KEEP, LONG AFTER YOUR RETURN. I’M COLORADO. AND I’LL SHOW YOU WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE TRULY ALIVE.

Get the guide at COLORADO.COM

M AY 2 0 1 8

13 COUNTRIES

THE EUROPE ISSUE

18 WRITERS 34 PHOTOGRAPHERS 76,000+ MILES TRAVELED

p. 56 Lake Mývatn, Iceland p. 15, 65

London p. 38

Liverpool, England p. 15

Portland, Oregon

Chicago

San Francisco p. 65 Charleston, South Carolina

p. 76

Paris p. 28 Andalusia, Spain

p. 15 New York City

p. 110 Rome

Switzerland

p. 65 Tel Aviv

p. 15, 65

Washington, D.C.

p. 49 Frankfurt

Amsterdam

p. 15

p. 65

p. 15

p. 98 Latvia p. 15

p. 92 Côte d’Azur, France

p. 84 Western Sicily

p. 22 Athenian Riviera, Greece

p. 15

Lake Orta, Italy p. 65 Bogotá, Colombia

DEPARTMENTS

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EDITOR’S NOTE

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REASONS TO TRAVEL NOW

The newest art foundation in Paris, your next Italian lake retreat, and more European travel inspiration. 22

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FEATURES

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The Athenian Riviera is a sun-dappled escape just a few miles from Greece’s busy capital. DETOUR

From its ancient hill towns to its vibrant cities, the colorful Spanish region of Andalusia is a paradise for food and art lovers. ROAD TRIP

If all you know about Liverpool is the Beatles, it’s time to get acquainted with this thriving, modern city.

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URBAN PL ANNER

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The new Crystal Bach, which transports guests along the Rhine in high style, is the latest luxury option for European river sailing. CRUISING

Frankfurt has never been known as an exciting place, but that’s changing thanks to a pair of neighborhoods that showcase the best of German culture.

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In praise of Switzerland’s unsung wine regions, from the country’s Alpine foothills and the shores of Lake Geneva to the outskirts of Zurich.

NEXT ACT

A couple looking to connect with Iceland through its famous hot springs finds more than they expected.

84

Tips and hacks for better travel, like frustration-fixing apps and one TV star’s carry-on essentials.

SICILIAN RENAISSANCE

The reborn Palermo is a marvelous place to see an art show, eat arancini, and go for a passeggiata—plus, it’s a perfect gateway to the vineyards and fishing villages of Sicily’s far west.

MEMORY

UPGRADE

A TASTE OF HEAVEN

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ALL THAT GLITTERS

On the captivating Côte d’Azur, a new hotel shows it’s still possible to find a true Provençal spirit amid the razzle-dazzle of France’s southern coast.

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LOVE, LIFE, LATVIA

In this fast-evolving nation, world-class urban hotels and fine dining coexist with countryside comforts and a traditional Baltic culture that’s stronger than ever. YOUR BEST SHOT

110 A glimpse inside the Vatican Museums in Rome, photographed by T+L reader Thai Dang. ON THE COVER A view of Lake Geneva over the rooftops of Rivaz, a town in Switzerland’s Lavaux wine region, as seen from the vineyards of Domaine Louis Bovard, page 76. Photograph by Simon Bajada.

T+ L D I G I TA L

Is It Summer Yet? It’s May—which means if you haven’t begun planning your summer vacation, now is the time to start. Lucky for you, we’re always filing away trip ideas to make life easier when the living finally does get easy—such as roundups of music festivals and solstice celebrations across the globe. tandl.me/summer

The Nyhavn waterfront in Copenhagen, one of many European destinations on our list of Where to Go in 2018 (tandl. me/2018-trips).

Traveler’s Best Friend

WHERE TO GO IN EUROPE Throughout this issue, we transport you to our favorite places and emerging destinations around the continent. Inspired to make your own hop across the pond? The T+L Travel Guide App has editor-curated recommendations in the must-see cities on any European tour, like Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Copenhagen, above, home to scenic canals, innovative New Nordic dining, and design-forward hotels. tandl.me/app

TANDL.ME/NEWSLETTERS

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DAILY TRANSPORTER Escape instantly with gorgeous photography features that take you to spectacular destinations.

UPGRADE Travel smarter with need-toknow updates on travel news and trends, plus tips and solutions from T+L experts.

T+L TEN An easy-to-read digest of the week’s biggest, most popular stories—so you can be sure you don’t miss the very best.

DEALS Get exclusive access to steeply discounted trips and travel essentials, all handpicked by our editors.

JUST IN Stay up-to-theminute with our bulletin of the latest stories and images published on traveland leisure.com.

DESTINATION OF THE WEEK Take a virtual deep dive into one exceptional location per week, with guides, photos, news, and more.

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F ROM L E F T: R OL F N OB E L / V IS U M/ R E D U X ; CAT H E R IN E L E D N E R

Planning to hit the road with your dog? Make sure Fido is taken care of just as well as you are. Head to tandl.me/ dog-friendly for our list of the best stays for four-legged visitors, and find more animal content—safari tips, wildlife photography advice, and, of course, videos of adorable creatures from around the world—at tandl.me/animals.

Refined notes. With an earthy finish. The Reimagined 2019 JeepÂŽ Cherokee.

For the connoisseur of tasteful design.

Š 2018 FCA US LLC. All rights reserved. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.

T+ L S P E C I A L S

TRAVEL HACK

T+L Deals Newsletter

Get up close and personal with Iceland’s wildlife on a femaleonly horseback-riding trip operated by AdventureWomen.

It’s a full-time job keeping track of all the travel offers on the Internet (believe us). Save yourself the hassle of price alerts and multiple browsers and get our T+L Deals newsletter instead. A weekly roundup of flight, hotel, cruise, and travel-gear deals, it’s like having a full-time vacation concierge. Sign up at tandl.me/opt-in.

OPERATION VACATION

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AdventureWomen Horseback Tour of Iceland

Le Pavillon Hotel, New Orleans

20 PERCENT OFF

33 PERCENT OFF

Calling all women wanderers! On this eight-day horseback-riding trip operated by AdventureWomen, a tour company that promotes female empowerment through travel, you’ll cross sweeping valleys, mighty lava fields, and soaring mountains on your way to attractions like the Gullfoss—a massive, glacier-fed waterfall—and a working dairy farm. After about 20 miles in the saddle each day, you’ll be ready to bunk down at Álftröð Guesthouse, a traditionally Nordic inn with minimalist rooms and an outdoor hot tub. The Details: 20 percent off a horseback-riding tour through Iceland. Offer includes accommodations, ground transportation, and meals. Tours from $4,792 per person; valid for June departures; use code T+LHORSEBACK when booking at 800-804-8686.

It’s easy to see how Le Pavillon earned its nickname, the Belle of New Orleans. Housed inside a stunning white-stone building near the French Quarter, the 226-room hotel has marble columns, crystal chandeliers, and hand-carved woodwork. Now, after a sensitive renovation, the 1907 property also has modern, tufted-leather armchairs and contemporary art. Head up to the heated rooftop pool for sweeping views of the city and the Mississippi River, or walk over to Bourbon Street, just five blocks away. The Details: 33 percent off one or more nights through November 30. Offer includes accommodation in any room category, two welcome cocktails, and breakfast for two at the Crystal Room. Doubles from $179 per night; use code TLNOLA when booking at 504-581-3111.

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T+L GREAT ADVENTURES

A Tanzanian Safari Our editors teamed up with active-travel company Butterfield & Robinson to design this private nine-day journey through northern Tanzania, which you can take anytime. It includes stops in many of our favorite locations, including the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater, and the lesser-known Tarangire National Park, where a walking tour will bring you face-toface with elephants and lions. You’ll spend the night at top lodges like Kuro Tarangire and Serengeti Safari Camp (pictured). For more information, visit tandl. me/butterfield. Nine days from $7,895 per person.

F ROM L E F T: C HR IST I A N K E R BE R / L A I F/ RE D U X ; C OU RT ESY OF N OM AD TA N Z AN IA

At Travel + Leisure, we want all Americans to join us in committing to using all our vacation days this year. So we created Operation Vacation, a program of exclusive travel deals designed to inspire your next trip. Whatever kind of adventure you’re looking for, you’ll find dozens of terrific discounts on flights, hotels, cruises, and vacation packages at travelandleisure.com/operationvacation. Two of this month’s highlights:

Time stands still. but you’re free to walk around. Ev e r y t h i n g c h a n g e s . O r s o w e’v e h e a r d . Ye t h e r e i n Wy o m i n g y o u c a n e x p e r i e n c e t h e w o n d e r o f v i s t a s u n a l t e r e d . Cu r i o s i t i e s t h at s t a n d d e f i a nt l y a s t h e y h av e f o r m i l l e n n i a . P l a c e s t h at i nv i t e y o u t o p au s e a n d r e f l e c t . W hy n o t s l ow d ow n a n d t a k e i t a l l i n . Fo r a c h a n g e .

EDITOR’S NOTE

a week in Switzerland. The country has a great many things that I love, among them crisp mountain air and food that ranges from the most beautiful cheese and charcuterie to refined haute cuisine. But it had been a number of years since my last visit. One of the things that I was reminded of this time is just how impossibly photogenic the country is. It’s one of those places where a single view can encompass dramatic snowcapped mountain peaks and the still blue water of a lake and rolling hills, dotted with chalets and cows at pasture—the platonic ideal of Swissness. One evening, I took a field trip from the fabulous Bürgenstock Hotel & Alpine Spa (burgenstock.ch; doubles from $584) above Lake Lucerne—which this year made T+L’s It List of the best new hotels (tandl.me/itlist)—and rode the funicular up to the top of Mount Pilatus, where I walked around admiring the view as the sun set. At one point my eye was caught by a little chapel set all on its own on an isolated crag of mountain a few hundred feet below, framed by a broad expanse of valley, and lit with the warm glow of Magic Hour. It’s hard to describe how serene and, well, gorgeous it was. I snapped a few photos, which were, of course, Instagram gold. It’s fitting that Switzerland, which encompasses so much of what makes Europe great—not only natural beauty but also cultural and historic richness and a fine epicurean tradition—is the cover star of this year’s Europe Issue. And wine and spirits editor Ray Isle’s feature story (page 76), which shares the wonderful and relatively unknown Swiss wine scene, is not to be missed. There’s lots more in these pages, including art and arancini in Sicily (page 84), the surprisingly sophisticated pleasures of Latvia (page 98), and fresh takes on places you thought you knew, like Athens (page 22) and Frankfurt (page 49). Europe may be the Old World, but its beauty is that no matter how many times you go, there’s always something new to discover. AST SUMMER I SPENT

@nathanlump nathan@travelandleisure.com

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From My Travels I have a taste for grand old hotels, but it’s true that they can often be too stuffy or too dowdy or not quite comfortable enough. So I was thrilled a few months ago when my husband and I visited Venice and spent a few nights at the Gritti Palace, a member of Marriott’s Luxury Collection and arguably one of the world’s best-known and most beloved hotels (thegritti palace.com; doubles from $1,281). I’ve been to Venice many times, and had long wanted to stay there, but had never managed it. It was winter, and the city was blissfully quiet. This in itself was a luxury, and had the happy effect of making us want to spend a bit more time than usual in the hotel, which is housed in an intimately scaled 15th-century palazzo. As is typical in historic properties, there’s a lot of variation in the rooms; ours, the Peggy Guggenheim Suite, had high ceilings, an extravagant marble bathroom, and, fittingly, walls hung chockablock with modern art—not to mention a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal. Everything about the Gritti feels designed to evoke pleasure, from the subtly solicitous service to the sumptuousness of the breakfast buffet. I’d stay again in a heartbeat.

F ROM TOP : N ATH A N LU MP ; B RI A N D O BE N

The view of the Grand Canal from the Peggy Guggenheim Suite at the Gritti Palace, in Venice.

MAGIC APP IN MY HANDS, I FOLLOW YOU UNTIL THE END MOBILE APP. Benefit from all its features: directions to the airport and boarding gate*, real-time flight information, notifications related to your flight, boarding pass available at any time… And so much more to discover at airfrance.us

* At Paris-Charles de Gaulle.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

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All eyes are on England—and not just because of the Royal Wedding.

JO H N PAWS ON

For fashion and design lovers, a quartet of style-minded exhibitions make this spring the perfect time to explore London. At the Design Museum, “Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier” (May 10–October 7; designmuseum.org) honors the Tunis-born, Paris-based “king of

cling,” whose form-fitting silhouettes helped define 1980s fashion. Developed by Alaïa himself before his death last November, the retrospective showcases 60 of his garments, in addition to works commissioned from a few of his favorite collaborators, such as

The main atrium of London’s Design Museum.

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The bar at Fairfax, in New York City’s West Village.

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The latest wine bars in the States are taking their cues from Europe. Until recently, the best places to find Europe’s great wines—and the unstuffy European approach to food and drink—were neighborhood bars in the gastronomic capitals of the Continent. “In Paris, half the time you’re drinking a fantastic natural wine and don’t even know it,” says noted sommelier Sebastian Zutant. Now chefs and somms in the U.S. are embracing the Euro-focused wine bar, making it easy to grab a glass of Gamay (and a killer Mediterranean meal) without a passport. Primrose, a D.C. spot by Zutant and his wife, Lauren Winter, is among an upswing of newcomers focusing their bottle lists on the Old World. — Hannah Walhout PRIMROSE

PETIT MARLOWE

FAIRFAX

ENOTECA NOSTRANA

Washington, D.C. Zutant rounds out a list of smallproduction bottles from Burgundy, Bordeaux, and the Loire with selections from the U.S., including his own Virginiamade label. Chef Nathan Beauchamp turns out bistro classics—terrines, steak frites—and a cavalcade of fresh baguettes. primrosedc.com.

San Francisco Anna Weinberg describes the dining style at her new brasserie as “like a coffee shop—but better.” Sommelier Lindsey DeSmidt curates a light and bright wine list to complement a menu of French classics— plus irreverent touches like the FG & J, a foie gras and blood-orangejelly sandwich. petit marlowesf.com.

New York City Gabe Stulman’s West Village hangout blurs genre lines between home, wine bar, and neighborhood café. An eclectic yet approachable wine list offers eye-openers like Andalusian Romé and Italian orange wine by the glass. Stop in at midday for the affordable plateand-glass-of-wine special. fairfax.nyc.

Portland, Oregon The latest chapter in chef Cathy Whims’s love story with Italy includes a wine list created with input from European vintners. Expect sublime spaghetti pomodoro, San Daniele ham sliced at the bar, and snacks like Ligurian focaccia di Recco—paperthin, cheese-stuffed flatbreads. enoteca nostrana.com.

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This Italian lakeside escape should be on every summer must-visit list. Forget Como. This year, in-the-know travelers are heading to Lake Orta, where Casa Fantini/ Lake Time (casafantinilaketime.com; doubles from $369) opened last fall. It’s a labor of love for Daniela Fantini, the CEO of 61-year-old design company Fantini Rubinetti, headquartered nearby. Spread across a historic villa and a contemporary addition, the hotel’s 11 rooms create an atmosphere of calm, with muted tones, stylishly spare furnishings, and massive floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto San Giulio Island’s towering Romanesque basilica.

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C LOC KW IS E FR OM TO P: E RI C ME D SK E R P H OTOG R AP H Y; C OU RTESY O F CASA FA NTINI; A ND R E AS VO N E INS IE D E L/A L A M Y STO CK PHOTO

Tatiana Trouvé and Kris Ruhs. The Fashion & Textile Museum (below), meanwhile, is presenting “Orla Kiely: A Life in Pattern” (May 25–September 23; ftmlondon.org), the first U.K. show dedicated to the Irish designer. The exhibit will feature more than 150 pieces of clothing, textiles, and housewares from the company archives, including the original sketches for Kiely’s ubiquitous Stem graphic, which has been splashed across mugs, scarves, and even cars. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, two sartorially centered shows are on view, starting with “Fashioned from Nature” (April 21–January 27, 2019; vam.ac.uk), a look at the clothing industry’s relationship with the natural world. Displays range from a feather cape to a dress made from a leather-like material produced with winemaking by-products. Starting next month, you’ll also be able to catch “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up” (June 16–November 4; vam.ac.uk), which spotlights the artist’s vibrant wardrobe and a collection of artifacts— cosmetics, prosthetics, photographs—discovered at her home and studio in Mexico City. — Siobhan Reid

R E A S O N S T O T R AV E L N O W

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A groundbreaking cultural center is shaking up the Paris art scene. It’s less than two months old, but Lafayette Anticipations (lafayette anticipations.com), the new institution created by department store Galeries Lafayette, is fast becoming one of Paris’s most innovative art spaces. Rem Koolhaas’s OMA firm renovated the 19th-century warehouse in the Marais, adding a steel-and-glass exhibition tower with retractable floors that allow for 49 configurations, making it possible to adapt to works of all shapes and sizes. With the inaugural Lutz Bacher installation a hit and new workshops and live performances soon to come, it joins the ranks of La Place, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and other centers that are giving the city’s art world an edge. — S.R.

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You can now wake up in England and be in the Netherlands by lunchtime. Eurostar’s new high-speed routes whisk riders directly from London to Amsterdam (above) and Rotterdam—a train trip that once meant five hours in transit with a stop in Brussels. Tickets start at $48 one way, and the journeys clock in at just under four hours to Amsterdam and three to Rotterdam. (Psst: When British weather gets the best of you, a quick trip to the flower market is a surefire day-brightener.) eurostar.com.

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These ships’ underwater lounges feel straight out of sci-fi.

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WATCH WILDLIFE

Two giant windows shaped like whale eyes let guests glimpse life below the waves. A trio of underwater cameras live-stream footage of marine life to screens throughout the space. The diffused blue lighting illuminates the sea without disturbing passing creatures.

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RIDE THE WAVES

Specialized hydrophones record ocean sounds from within a threemile radius. This aquatic soundscape is then piped in to the Blue Eye. Guests seated in mechanical Body Listening Sofas feel the subtle motions of the sea as they listen to this ambient underwater soundtrack.

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MEDITATE

The design is inspired by the marine environment, from the white stripes of a whale to the sinuous shape of a jellyfish tentacle. The space is meant for quiet contemplation, but if you’re curious about what you’re seeing, the ship has nature guides on staff.

F ROM TOP : F E LI X OD E L L; C OU RT ESY OF P ON A N T

French cruise line Ponant launches two new vessels this summer, each outfitted with Blue Eye multisensory spaces—futuristic underwater lounges that put the surrounding sea at center stage. Here’s what they let you do. — Melanie Lieberman

Wait, This Is Athens? Just 10 miles outside the city center, the beaches, hotels, and restaurants of the revived Athenian Riviera offer a revelatory new way to experience the Greek capital. BY ELENI N. GAGE in mythical Greece, it feels as if time has slowed to one long, golden hour. As the sun dips below the horizon and everything is flushed with a rosy glow—from the ancient ruins behind you to the plate of fresh-grilled octopus being delivered to your table— it’s hard to believe you’re not on a remote island somewhere in the Cyclades, but just a half-hour drive from the capital’s frenetic center on an enchanting stretch of coast known as the Athenian Riviera. Running from the busy suburb of Faliro to the windswept Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, this

H E RE O N T H E B E AC H

Skalakia Beach, one of many places to swim on the 35-mile Athenian Riviera.

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35-mile strip of sand has been a bolthole for well-to-do Athenians for more than half a century. They know it as a place to bask on the beach, perhaps take in some ancient architecture, and dine at one or two of the sophisticated Athens restaurants that have opened outposts along the shore. In the past, foreign visitors to the Riviera have been mostly limited to diaspora Greeks and the yacht owners who moor their boats in the marina. This summer, however, all that is likely to change, thanks to a massive investment project on the cape of Lemos, including the launch, next month, of the Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens—the first Four Seasons in Greece (fourseasons.com; doubles from $985). For some, the new hotel will be an introduction to the area, but for many others, and Greeks in particular, it will represent the reinvention of a modern classic. That’s because it

P E T ROS KOU BL I S

DETOUR

will occupy the Astir Palace—a sprawling 1961 landmark built during the contemporary city’s heyday, after World War II and the Greek Civil War, but before the military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. Throughout the 60s, the hotel was the place to be seen. “There is a saying that anybody who was anybody has slept in one of the beds at the Astir Palace,” says Efi Pratsoli, corporate marketing director of Astir Palace Vouliagmeni. Frank Sinatra once had to flee adoring crowds through the hotel kitchen, while Brigitte Bardot caused a stir by strolling the beach in a wide-brimmed sun hat and a tiny pink bikini. The Astir Palace continued to attract big names right up until 2016, when the final guest before the hotel closed was Barack Obama, on his last oicial visit to Greece as president. In June, the hotel will reopen after a $123 million renovation, with 303 redesigned guest rooms; eight restaurants, including a branch of the Nobu franchise, Matsuhisa Athens; and a spa inspired by the teachings of Hippocrates. The restaurant at Astir Beach, formerly a TGI Fridays, will relaunch as the latest from Nice-n-Easy, a farm-to-table restaurant group with seven outposts around Greece (niceneasy.gr; entrées $25–$50). “In the old days, the Fridays would close at eight,” says founder Dimitris Christoforidis. “That was a crime, because the sun sets right in front of you.” The new Nice-n-Easy will stay open until 11:30 p.m. and serve contemporary Greek cuisine. The Astir complex will shine a spotlight on the coast just south of the city for visitors who may have seen Athens as a place to fly in to, see the Acropolis, then escape from, by boat or by air, to the island of their choice. Why would you,

Above: The Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel, opening in June. Below: The Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, on the Athenian Riviera.

NEXT STOPS

Three trips to pair with a stay on the Athenian Riviera, as chosen by Christos Stergiou at expert tour operator True Greece. truegreece.com. PORTO HELI, THE PELOPONNESE

2½ hours by car Make Amanzoe (aman.com; doubles from $1,200) your base for touring the sights of the southern mainland. SPETSES, THE SARONIC ISLANDS

2 hours by ferry Stay at Poseidonion Grand Hotel (poseidonion.com; doubles from $200) while exploring this sophisticated island. HALKIDIKI, NORTHERN GREECE

A 1-hour flight, plus a 1-hour drive Zone out on the private beach at Sani Resort (sani-resort.com; doubles from $290).

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when you can stay at the beach and still have access to the cultural sites of central Athens? “What I love about the city is that it has so much to offer,” says cookbook author Tatiana Blatnik, who lives in Athens with her husband, Prince Nikolaos, the son of the former king of Greece, and runs the activetravel website thehact.com. “You have mountains in the north, the sea in the south, and the city center—and you can be in any of these environments in less than half an hour.” Blatnik raves about the organic farm owned by the Margi (margifarm. gr; tour and dinner $98), a small, family-run boutique hotel and restaurant in inland Vouliagmeni. “They offer this farm-to-table experience where you get eggs from the chickens and fresh cheese from the goats and the chef creates a delicious local meal,” she says. Seafood is another big draw, whether it’s grilled whole fish at a low-key taverna like Louizidis (2 Ermou, Vouliagmeni; entrées $8–$26), sushi at Kohylia in the Grand Resort Lagonissi (lagonissiresort.gr; entrées $25–$38), or the cuttlefish risotto at Michelin-starred Varoulko (varoulko.gr; entrées $68–$74) near the port of Piraeus, a half-hour’s drive northwest of Vouliagmeni. Another must-do is to take a dip in Lake Vouliagmeni (limnivouliagmenis. gr), a thermal-spring-fed lagoon with a world-class wellness facility and restaurant attached. The waters are said to relieve everything from eczema to trauma, though many visitors just go to take in the spectacular scenery. Whichever you choose, you may find that on your next Greece trip, you decide to make Athens a destination, rather than just a stopover.

F ROM TOP : C O URTESY OF FOU R SE ASON S AST IR PAL AC E H OT E L ATH E N S; OLE NA K ACHM A R /A L A M Y

DETOUR

*FREE Roundtrip Air includes ground transfers and applies to coach, roundtrip flights only from the following airports: ATL, BOS, CLT, DEN, DFW, DTW, EWR, FLL, IAD, IAH, JFK, LAX, LGA, MCO, MDW, MIA, MSP, ORD, PBI, PHL, PHX, SAN, SAV, SEA, SFO, TPA, YUL, YVR, YYZ. Airfare is available from select other U.S. and Canadian gateways for an additional charge. FREE Air includes all airline fees, surcharges and government taxes, however, airline-imposed personal charges such as baggage fees may apply. FREE Business Class Air applies

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ROAD TRIP

Sketches of Southern Spain Ancient villages and incredible tapas have always been staples of an Andalusia trip; add the region’s newly dynamic cities into the mix, and you have the recipe for a perfect tour. BY ALEXANDRA MARSHALL Archidona, a village an hour’s drive north of my in-laws, and had been raving about the revival of Málaga, just a 45-minute drive to the south. I’d always wanted to see Andalusia’s whitewashed hill towns, said to feel frozen in time. So I decided on an escape: I’d start in Málaga, pop over to Ronda, the White Town You Must See, head northwest to Seville, and then check out my friend’s B&B in Archidona, with as many aimless detours as I could fit in along the way.

Whitewashed buildings cling to the hillsides in Ronda, an ancient city in southern Spain’s Málaga province.

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JESS I CA SA MP LE

FOR THE RECORD, I love my in-laws dearly. But last summer, when my partner was unexpectedly called away to work during our visit to his parents’ vacation home on the Spanish coast near Málaga, I got the urge to wander. All around me lay Andalusia, an evocative region I had barely dipped into—despite a college-age obsession with its famous native son, the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Not long ago a friend from London had opened a B&B in

ROAD TRIP SEVILLE SPAIN PORTUGAL DAY 5

MÁLAGA

I picked up a tin-can rental car at Málaga airport—and realized my mistake immediately. It became a millstone in the city’s almost entirely pedestrian historic center, made up of beautifully restored Baroque and Art Deco town houses. After stashing the car in a parking lot, I promptly forgot where it was, which meant later having to wind my way through marble-paved streets off the stately Marqués de Lario thoroughfare trying to find it. This took me past Casa Mira, a confectioner founded in 1890, where I ate a dense turrón, or nougat, ice cream that still haunts my dreams. I loved Málaga’s impossibly grand Renaissance cathedral and the new port district with its flashy contemporary architecture—like the sleek Palmeral de las Sorpresas, a covered promenade that snakes along the broad shoreline like the skeleton of an eel. At the tail end (or maybe it’s the head?) sits Daniel Buren’s airy, upbeat El Cubo, a boxy, happy pavilion of colored glass. It’s the aboveground portion of the Centre Pompidou Málaga, the first offshoot outside France of Paris’s iconic modern-art museum. Not bad for a town that was, until recently, in a state of dereliction and disrepair. At the other end of the eel is a neighborhood of Art Deco apartment buildings and 1960s towers that local urban revivalists have named Soho, unconcerned by the obvious comparisons to London or New York City. Once a warren of sex shops, it’s now home to health-food stores, cafés, and a booming street-art program known as MAUS (Málaga Arte Urbano Soho) with major pieces by Shepard Fairey, Belgium’s ROA, and

106 miles Andalusia ARCHIDONA

DAY 4 54 miles

DAY 3 54 miles ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA

RONDA

DAY 2 63 miles

MÁLAGA DAY 1

ANDALUSIA ROAD-TRIP CHEAT SHEET GETTING THERE

Fly or take the train to Málaga from Madrid or Barcelona and rent a car. DAY 1: ARRIVAL IN MÁL AGA Stay at the

imposing Gran Hotel Miramar (granhotel miramarmalaga. com; doubles from $334). Visit the Centre Pompidou Málaga, a pop-up by the Paris Pompidou set to remain open through 2025 (pompidou-malaga. eu). Stop for a turrón ice cream at historic confectionery Casa Mira (5 Marqués de Lario; 34-952-2230-69). Try an Andalusian cooking class at Laboratorio de Sabores (laboratoriode sabores.com) before feasting on the modern Spanish tasting menu at Sollo Restaurant (sollo.es; tasting menu $95).

DAY 2: MÁLAGA→ RONDA

Recharge after the drive with wine and tapas at Ronda’s Tragatá (tragata. com). Spend the night at the delightful Hotel la Fuente de la Higuera (hotella fuente.com; doubles from $219), hidden in the hills just outside town. DAY 3: RONDA→ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA

Don’t miss Arcos’s Iglesia de San Pedro (4 Calle San Pedro), a hilltop church with a spectacular gold altar. Stay at La Casa Grande (lacasa grande.net; doubles from $103), a 1729 manor house that’s now a boutique hotel. DAY 4: ARCOS DE L A FRONTERA→SEVILLE

Get to Seville by lunchtime to explore the Mercado Lonja del Barranco

(mercadolonjadel barranco.com), a food hall in a former fish market. Aim to spend a whole afternoon at the Real Alcazar (alcazarsevilla.org), the palace of the city’s Muslim kings. Take refuge from the city heat by staying at Hacienda de San Rafael (haciendade sanrafael.com; doubles from $344), on an olive estate 45 minutes outside town. DAY 5: SEVILLE→ ARCHIDONA

Have lunch at Archidona’s Bar Central (49 Calle Nueva) before checking in to Almohalla 51 (almohalla51.com; doubles from $125), a stylish B&B run by London transplants. The superior small plates at Arte de Tapas (artedecocina. com) make it perfect for dinner.

From left: El Cubo, a pavilion marking the entrance to the new Centre Pompidou Málaga; roasted tilapia with cream of smoked chard at Sollo Restaurant, outside Málaga.

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F ROM L E F T: M . RA MI R E Z / A L A MY ; C OU RT ESY O F S OLLO R ESTAU R A N T

D AY 1

Visit travel.luxuryretreats.com to get help planning your next vacation.

ROAD TRIP

D AY 2

RONDA

It was a good thing I wasn’t in a hurry, either. The friendly German-Dutch couple that owns Hotel la Fuente de la Higuera, a romantic rural B&B just outside Ronda, did their best to guide me by phone through the pouring rain to their renovated manor house, but the drive took far longer than I’d bargained for. When I finally arrived, I didn’t want to leave my suite, with its fireplace, antiques, and view of the hills, but Ronda is so spectacular, everyone had told me. Perched on a dizzying gorge that cleaves the medieval old town from its 18th- and 19thcentury outskirts, Ronda is indeed spectacular, with its bright, whitewashed town houses trimmed in mustardy ocher or blood red. Hoping to escape my fellow travelers, who snaked through every tiny byway like ants, I wandered into Santa María la Mayor, a church built on Moorish foundations after the 15th-

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century Reconquista. I had unwittingly arrived right at the point in a Catholic service when members of the congregation are called to embrace their neighbors, and was greeted like a fellow pilgrim. I didn’t care that Tragatá, a shoebox-size tapas bar, was on the busiest street in town. The original outpost of what’s become a chain across Spain, Tragatá, much like Ronda, is far from an insider secret. But, also like Ronda, it is worth it—even for the crowd-averse. There were big local reds paired with delicately smoked sardines on tomato bread and a superb dish of stewed pork cheeks. I was just glad I came before the lunch rush, which in Spain starts well after 2 p.m. D AY 3

The Plaza de la Constitución, one of the highlights of Málaga’s Old Town.

ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA

As I drove downhill through shady pine forests, more white towns appeared, like spills of Liquid Paper atop the brown hillsides, with dashing names like Zahara de la Sierra, Grazalema, and Arcos de la Frontera. I detoured to the lattermost after a steep climb up narrow roads. At the town’s fortresslike 16th-century church, San Pedro, in the tiny medieval center, a wedding was just finishing up. Rose petals fluttered over the esplanade as little girls in spit curls and organza ran by. I drank a beer at a small café beside the church while the owner

A L E KSA N D R A OL EJ N I K

Cape Town artist Faith47. “When they cleaned up the center of the city in 2016, Soho was the part left over,” said Amparo López, whose nearby cooking workshop, Laboratorio de Sabores, promotes Andalusian food. “In the five years we’ve been here, it’s gotten so much nicer,” she added. She said the region’s tourists are only now getting a real sense of its cuisine—beyond tapas, which some say originated here and are now as important to Spanish culture as flamenco (also Andalusian) and bullfighting (ditto). The much-talked-about fine-dining restaurant Sollo, a short drive along the coast to the west, was a good place to dig deeper into Andalusian food’s modern-day iteration. But first I had to find it. (Pro tip: given the profound unreliability of GPS in Spain, always have a highway map on hand.) After my five panicked phone calls from somewhere in the hills around Fuengirola, chef Diego Gallegos met me at the entrance of the Doubletree Inn, which (somewhat incongruously) houses the restaurant, to escort me back to his tiny, Scandinavian-inspired space. As is only right when dining this close to the ocean, fish featured prominently on his tasting menu, from sea trout with garlic greens and parsnip purée to a macaron of Andalusian sturgeon sobrassada and black pudding. Bite after elaborately plated bite came accompanied by powerful local wines, which I sipped as crickets sang from the mountainside. Gallegos, who is Brazilian and apprenticed with star São Paulo chef Alex Atala, settled in Andalusia after falling in love with a local. “The people here are friendlier and calmer, not in so much of a hurry,” he said.

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7Â…>ĂŒ >Ă€i ĂŒÂ…i ÂŤÂœĂƒĂƒÂˆLÂ?i ĂƒÂˆ`i ivviVĂŒĂƒ Âœv 8ˆˆ`Ă€>Âś The most common side effects of Xiidra include eye irritation, discomfort, or blurred vision when the drops are applied to the eyes, and an unusual taste sensation (dysgeusia). Seek medical care immediately if you get any symptoms of wheezing, difficulty breathing, or swollen tongue. These are not all the possible side effects of Xiidra. Tell your doctor if you have any side effects that bother you. You may report side effects to the FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

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Âœ Â˜ÂœĂŒ Ă•Ăƒi 8ˆˆ`Ă€>\ If you are allergic to lifitegrast or any of the other ingredients in Xiidra (see “What are the ingredients in Xiidra?â€?) 7Â…>ĂŒ ĂƒÂ…ÂœĂ•Â?` ĂŒiÂ?Â? “Þ `ÂœVĂŒÂœĂ€ LivÂœĂ€i Ă•ĂƒÂˆÂ˜} 8ˆˆ`Ă€>Âś Before you use Xiidra, tell your doctor if you: • are using any other eye drops • wear contact lenses • are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if Xiidra will harm your unborn baby. • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if Xiidra passes into your breast milk. Talk to your doctor about the best way to feed your baby if you use Xiidra. ÂœĂœ ĂƒÂ…ÂœĂ•Â?` Ă•Ăƒi 8ˆˆ`Ă€>Âś Talk to your doctor or pharmacist for additional instructions about the right way to use Xiidra. Use Xiidra exactly as your doctor tells you. • To help avoid eye injury or contamination of the solution, do not touch the container tip to your eye or any surface. • If you wear contact lenses, remove them before using Xiidra and wait for at least 15 minutes before placing them back in your eyes. • Use 1 drop of Xiidra in each eye, 2 times each day, about 12 hours apart. • Use Xiidra right away after opening. Throw away the single use container and any unused solution after you have applied the dose to both eyes. Do not save any unused Xiidra for later.

i˜iĂ€>Â? ˆ˜vÂœĂ€Â“>ĂŒÂˆÂœÂ˜ >LÂœĂ•ĂŒ ĂŒÂ…i Ăƒ>vi >˜` ivviVĂŒÂˆĂ›i Ă•Ăƒi Âœv 8ˆˆ`Ă€>° The risk information provided here is not comprehensive. To learn more, talk about Xiidra with your health care provider or pharmacist. The FDA-approved product labeling can be found at http://www.shirecontent.com/PI/PDFs/Xiidra_ USA_ENG.pdf or 1-800-828-2088. Do not use Xiidra for a condition for which it was not prescribed. Do not give Xiidra to other people, even if they have the same symptoms you have. It may harm them. 7Â…>ĂŒ >Ă€i ĂŒÂ…i ˆ˜}Ă€i`ˆiÂ˜ĂŒĂƒ ˆ˜ 8ˆˆ`Ă€>Âś Active ingredient: lifitegrast Inactive ingredients: sodium chloride, sodium phosphate dibasic anhydrous, sodium thiosulfate pentahydrate, sodium hydroxide and/or hydrochloric acid (to adjust pH) and water for injection. Manufactured for: Shire US Inc., 300 Shire Way, Lexington, MA 02421 For more information, go to www.Xiidra.com or call 1-800-828-2088. Š2017 Shire US Inc. All rights reserved. SHIRE and the Shire Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Shire Pharmaceutical Holdings Ireland Limited or its affiliates. Marks designated ÂŽ and ™ are owned by Shire or an affiliated company Patented: please see https://www.shire.com/legalnotice/product-patents Last Modified: 12/2017 S34025

ÂœĂœ ĂƒÂ…ÂœĂ•Â?` ĂƒĂŒÂœĂ€i 8ˆˆ`Ă€>Âś • Store Xiidra at room temperature between 68°F to 77°F (20°C to 25°C). • Store Xiidra in the original foil pouch to protect it from light. • Do not open the Xiidra foil pouch until you are ready to use the eye drops. • Return unused single use containers to their original foil pouch to protect from excessive light exposure. Keep Xiidra and all medicines out of the reach of children.

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ROAD TRIP

I had planned on booking into the lovely Corral del Rey hotel, which is smack in the middle of the crowded historic center. But after all the stimulation of a day in the city, I decided, instead, to hole up at its sister property, Hacienda de San Rafael, halfway between Arcos de la Frontera and Seville. Its pool area, bright with bougainvillea, made the perfect antidote to the heat and the crowds of Seville. D AY 5

From top: Seville’s Real Alcazar is one of the world’s finest examples of Moorish design; terra-cotta tiles and whitewashed walls provide respite from the heat at Almohalla 51 guesthouse, in Archidona.

of a neighboring hole-in-the-wall sang a serenade to two old ladies—the idyll disturbed only by the bridal party whipping down the narrow street in a shiny cobalt Mercedes. Arcos de la Frontera might be unassuming compared with the grandeur of Ronda, but its tranquility was a tonic. Unencumbered by expectations, I spent some of the loveliest hours of my trip there.

F ROM TOP : ST E DA M K I E F E R / V IS U M/ R E D U X ; S IO BH A N D OR A / V I E W PI CT U RES LTD / A L A M Y

D AY 4

SEVILLE

The scenery flattened out on the way to Seville, turning monotonous and brown. Upon entering the city, I realized the drive had been a useful palate cleanser. Seville’s contentious history is written in Technicolor across its proud Baroque palaces, Gothic cathedrals, Moorish masterpieces, and jungly parks. It’s a place that goes all the way with its aesthetic ambition and always has, from the lattice stonework of the 13th-century Real Alcazar to Jürgen Mayer’s Metropol Parasol art installation: six massive mushrooms made from grids of pale wood that seem to float above Plaza de la Encarnación. Everyone seemed to be talking about the Mercado Lonja del Barranco, a food market in a newly restored iron-and-glass building designed by Gustave Eiffel on the Guadalquivir River. The crowd—mostly locals—grazed on samplers of paella, cheese plates from the Madrid-based Poncelet Cheese Tavern, and an array of salmorejos, or bread-thickened tomato soups.

ARCHIDONA

My friendship with David Matthews was forged in the hellfire of London magazine publishing, and when he chucked it in to open a B&B, I cheered for him. He and his husband, Myles Gregson, built Almohalla 51 out of two adjoining town houses in Archidona, a village that sits at the foot of the Sierra de Gracia mountains. The sun was beating down when I arrived, so the big brass bed in my whitewashed room, which had a ceiling lined with exposed beams, was welcome. “Nothing much happens around here,” Matthews said with a laugh, though guests can, in fact, visit the prehistoric rock formations of El Torcal and the beautiful Baroque city of Antequera, both just around the corner. I popped into the latter, thinking I’d make an afternoon of it. But after a stop at Arte de Tapas, an excellent contemporary luncheonette, the idleness of Andalusia took over. I skipped the sights and drove back to Archidona’s Bar Central, where I passed a couple of hours people-watching under rows of dangling hams. A man carrying a bag of foam pool noodles walked in to say hello to some friends. He took one and bopped everyone at the table over the head, his laughter bellowing out. I was a little disappointed he didn’t get around to me. Alexandra Marshall is a freelance writer based in Paris and a regular contributor to T+L.

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URBAN PLANNER

A New Look for Liverpool Though it’s been more than 50 years since the Beatles sprang to fame from this lively English port, their presence still lingers on in its dynamic music and nightlife scene. But the city offers so much more than that. Over the past decade, it has undergone an artistic and culinary rebirth— and an accompanying surge in stylish places to eat, drink, and stay. Here, six spots to inspire you to add a stop in Liverpool to your next U.K. itinerary. — Jonathan Thompson

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1 WALKER ART GALLERY Though

under the radar of many international visitors, this spectacular 1877 museum houses one of the U.K.’s largest art collections outside London, ranging from Renaissance masterpieces to game-changing works by contemporary names like the Liverpool-raised Singh Twins. liverpoolmuseums. org.uk/walker. 2 WRECKFISH

Opened in a former watchmaker’s workshop last fall after a record-breaking crowdsourcing campaign, Wreckfish is the hottest spot in town. For a true taste of northern hospitality, try its simple bistro

food with a twist (think côte de boeuf served with truffle macaroni) at the welcoming communal table. wreckfish.co; entrées $23–$32. 3 THE BERRY & RYE

Gain entry to this exquisite speakeasy-style bar by knocking on the beaten-up front door; a staffer will usher you into a warm cocoon of candlelight, where the craft cocktails are listed on menus concealed inside leather-bound books. fb.com/ berryandrye. 4 BALTIC MARKET

Since opening in the iconic Cains Brewery building last summer, this space has become the centerpiece of Liverpool’s resurgent Baltic Triangle. It’s home to vendors like Hafla Hafla, which serves inventive Middle Eastern fare, and Izakaya, which sells Japanese street food. It also has a cocktail bar, music events, and a weekly farmers’ market. balticmarket.co.uk.

5 2 BLACKBURNE TERRACE A stone’s

throw from some of the city’s biggest attractions, this B&B is hidden away in a National Heritage–listed town house on a side street in the Georgian Quarter. Its four luxurious guest rooms are kitted out with vintage furniture and one-off objets, while the breakfast is feastlike in both pomp and proportion. 2blackburne terrace.com; doubles from $210. 6 ART SCHOOL

This fine-dining restaurant may occupy a former Victorian orphanage, but chef Paul Askew’s lavish, locally sourced tasting menu will banish any Oliver Twist comparisons. You may, however, want more of dishes like the twice-baked soufflé of wild mushrooms and chestnuts. theartschool restaurant.co.uk; prix fixe from $35.

C LOC KW IS E FR OM TO P: LOU I S E R E A D / C O U RT ESY OF 2 B L AC K BU R N E T E R R ACE; DA NIE L B RYA N; CO U RTESY O F W R ECK FIS H

Clockwise from above: A lounge area at 2 Blackburne Terrace, a B&B in Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter; wood-fired pizza at the Baltic Market; steak tartare at Wreckfish.

May River in May means slowly drifting into Summertime.

The South Carolina Lowcountry is a majestic place in summertime. A special place made for exploring the reined coastal life. For paddleboarding down the May River waterways or ishing upstream. For losing yourself on hiking trails on long, lazy days. Splashing in the pool to worship the afternoon sun. And reserved for indulging in epicurean feats while savoring the sunsets. Playful landscapes and distinctive adventures invite you to Summer at Montage Palmetto Bluff

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For some, it’s sitting down to the first five-star dinner of the trip, and being transported by the rich, unexpected flavors awaiting you. For others, it’s sailing into an exotic, remote port without another ship in sight. And for you, it’s the little things. Discover your moment.

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Take Me to the River With scenic ports, innovative design, and wine that comes right from the source, river cruising is bigger than ever in Europe. Jacqueline Gifford sets sail on the Crystal Bach to find out how one of the newest ships measures up. I TOUCH ED DOW N in Amsterdam on a rainy Sunday

Above: The Crystal Bach cruises the Rhine River between Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Here, it sails by Maus Castle in Wellmich, Germany.

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morning, with every intention of wandering the city that afternoon. But as a bracing wind carried me up the gangplank of the luxe Crystal Bach, my home on the Rhine River for the next few nights, I decided this was more the kind of weather for staying indoors and curling up with a good book. Or, in my case, sitting down to a buffet lunch of country pâtés with plum chutney, artichoke salad with black-trule vinaigrette, and the most heavenly Dutch cheese soup, cut with cherry water to add a little sweetness. Who needed Amsterdam? Why, I asked myself, had I not done more river cruises? In recent years, this style of travel has exploded in popularity, in no small part because whether you’re

on the Danube, the Mekong, or the Amazon, the ships are always intimate and they hit a lot of ports, sometimes two in a day. Multiple companies have launched recently to focus on this type of cruising, including Crystal River Cruises, an offshoot of the awardwinning ocean line. The Bach quickly quashed any fears I had about choosing a ship over a hotel, particularly in Europe, where the standards for design and food are so high. The ship marries world-class amenities—a swimming pool, an indulgent glass of Château d’Yquem—with ever-changing views and the pleasures of drifting down the Rhine. Launched in 2017, the Bach feels like a floating boutique property. So do its sister ships, Debussy and Ravel, both of which debuted this spring; Mahler, inaugurated last year; and Mozart, which first set sail in

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Above: Each River Suite Deluxe on the Bach has a panorama window facing the water. The top portion opens to let in fresh air. Below right: Waterside, the Bach’s main restaurant, emphasizes local food such as Dutch cheeses and grilled sausages with sauerkraut.

2016. The cabins across all five vessels are sleek and minimalist, in a crisp white-and-gray color scheme accented by pops of emerald and amethyst. The Petite Suites, sized at 188 square feet, are best for solo travelers, while the River Suite Deluxe cabins, which start at 237 square feet, are ideal for couples. Thoughtful details like a walk-in closet and a rainfall shower operated with a push of a button made my River Suite Deluxe feel extra sumptuous. For those who want to stay in their own floating apartment, the one- and two-bedroom suites have sitting rooms with ambient fireplaces. The Bach, which holds 106 passengers, does 14-night sailings between Amsterdam and Frankfurt, stopping in both large cities like Antwerp, Belgium, and small ports like Rudesheim, Germany, famous for its medieval Old Town and Christmas market. Nearly all river-cruise lines offer complimentary excursions, and Crystal is no exception, taking you to places like the Rubens House, Peter Paul Rubens’s art-filled 17th-century palazzo in Antwerp, and the Netherlands’ Kröller-Müller Museum, home to the world’s second-largest collection of van Goghs. That said, where Crystal really stands out from the competition is on the ship. After a long day in port, the first thing that greets you on the third deck of the Bach is a charming café offering French-press coffee and shaken Zotter hot chocolate—not to mention apple strudels and sandwiches. Toward the bow is the Palm Court lounge, crowned by a honeycomb-like glass ceiling that lets daylight flood the space. In the evening, I would go there to drink a glass of Grüner Veltliner and admire the lights onshore. Downstairs, on the first deck, is the main dining room, Waterside. With its floor-to-ceiling windows and leather banquettes, the space transitions beautifully from casual

buffet-style breakfasts and lunches to more formal dinners, where you can feast on forest-mushroom tart and slow-braised lamb shank. What’s more, Crystal sources the freshest ingredients in port and never dishes up the same thing twice on a sailing. (Unless you ask: after I fell hard for the beef carpaccio with shaved trules my first night, the kitchen served it to me again.) And then there’s the wine. Passengers can choose from 25 complimentary pours by the glass, with a strong focus on Germany and Austria. For true oenophiles, it’s worth the extra $356 per person to book the Vintage Room, the ship’s private dining space for up to 12 people. It was there, during a sevencourse dinner, that I sipped that glass of Château d’Yquem, which came paired with a dark chocolate mousse. It followed a broiled turbot accompanied by a Riesling from Prager, a boutique Austrian winery I’d discovered years earlier. Families and couples who have become friends on previous sailings often book the Vintage Room. On a ship this size and this well appointed, it’s easy to get comfortable with one another. 14-night sailings from $5,685 per person, all-inclusive; crystalcruises.com. Jacqueline Gifford is the travel director of Travel + Leisure.

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NE X T ACT

A view of Frankfurt Cathedral from the Römerberg, a historic square in the heart of the rebuilt DomRömer district.

in Europe—London,

SOME CITIES Berlin—are famous

Fun Comes to Frankfurt Once, Germany’s buttoned-up business capital was a place you went for work or because you were just passing through. Now, though, a blossoming of culture and cuisine that engages with the city’s past is making it a legitimately great destination. BY RAPHAEL KADUSHIN Photographs by Ériver Hijano

for throwing off sparks of excitement, regularly launching global trends and attractions. Then there’s Frankfurt. Germany’s banking center, long regarded as industrious but dull, rarely attracts much attention. But that’s changing as two very different neighborhoods emerge as genuinely exciting urban playgrounds. In May, the DomRömer district (domroemer.de) opens to the public after years of construction. This historic pocket of Frankfurt’s Altstadt, or Old Town, has been meticulously re-created, and late this summer will make its formal debut as a mixed-use development with a medieval vibe, home to shops, museums, apartments, and small businesses. It joins a more organic pattern of urban renewal taking place to the west, where a wave of clubs, galleries, and restaurants are transforming the Bahnhofsviertel neighborhood from sleazy to downright stylish. Frankfurt proved its talent for renewal once before: the Römerberg, a Gothic town square flattened by Allied bombs during World War II, was rebuilt in the 1980s with painstaking attention to detail. But the blocks between the square and Frankfurt Cathedral remained blighted by a parking garage and Brutalist postwar buildings. In an effort to change that, the city approved a major redevelopment plan in 2007, and over the past decade, Europe’s

travelandleisure.com

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NEX T ACT

DomRömer’s alleyways, squares, and patrician town houses have been resurrected down to the last gargoyle.

From top: Beets with feta and passionfruit vinaigrette at Stanley Diamond, in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel neighborhood; Ralf Seinecke and Daniel Schierke in their contemporary art space Galerie Rundgaenger, a few blocks away; the nearby Hammer Museum, a collection of mallets, gavels, and sledgehammers.

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brightest young architects and craftspeople have drawn on old blueprints, paintings, and photographs to reconstruct the area as it appeared before the war. The result is DomRömer, a web of alleyways, squares, courtyards, and patrician town houses that have been resurrected down to the last gargoyle and lick of decorative plaster. The neighborhood now reads like a sort of primer on historical architecture, showcasing a patchwork of styles from Baroque to Rococo to Romantic. The most dazzling showpiece is the House of the Golden Scales (5 Markt), a gabled 17th-century building that sports enough timber to have felled a small forest and will soon open with a street-level café and a museum upstairs. Jutting off the façade are the stone heads of its first owners, a bug-eyed burgher and his wife, looking surprised to be back where they started. The developers tracked the original busts down to a private home outside the city, where they’d been languishing since the war. Even the retailers slated to move in later this year have a touch of the quaint. Forget fast food or franchises: opening in August will be a small china shop, a millinery, a bakery, and a restaurant serving traditional German food. When there was no existing record to draw from, the designers came up with their own plans, producing 20 new structures that play off classical styles. Chief among the additions is the Stadthaus am Markt (stadthaus-am-markt.de), a community exhibition space that is the heart of the quarter. The hall has an austere Modernist exterior, but its narrow windows and deeply pitched roof harmonize with the surrounding medieval silhouettes. On the ground floor is the Archaeological Garden, a protected excavation of the bones of early Frankfurt, including the remains of a Roman military camp. Over in the Bahnhofsviertel district, tradition is the last thing on anyone’s mind. Until recently, this was strictly the turf of drug dealers and strip clubs, its bright spots (like the multicultural mix of family-run shops and restaurants) obscured by its sketchy reputation. But an infusion of artists hunting for cheap studio space and cheaper drinks has started to revive the area. Leading the resurgence are brothers David and James Ardinast of Maxie Eisen (maxieeisen. com; entrées $11–$18), a four-year-old deli that

WE GO THE E X T R A 7, 9 0 0 M I L E S (MANGOS VIA MAHARASHTRA)

NE X T ACT Altstadt The DomRömer district

The Bahnhofsviertel neighborhood

From top: A view from the new Stadthaus am Markt, a community center in DomRömer; Plank, a coffee shop in the Bahnhofsviertel.

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nods to the brothers’ Jewish roots with pastrami platters and matzo ball soup. Its success led the pair to open Stanley Diamond (stanley diamond.com; entrées $22–$44), a pocket of calm on a still-dicey block, where cooks with haute-cuisine credentials whip up dishes like wild monkfish capped by foamed beurre blanc. “We believed in the Bahnhofsviertel even when others didn’t,” David says. “I’d come here when I was a boy, with my parents, for Chinese, Turkish, and Lebanese food. There was an interesting mix of people and something exciting was always going on.” Other hangouts have since joined the Ardinasts’ pioneering spots: the coffeehouse Plank (barplank.de) lures a boho crowd, and Kiosk Yok-Yok (fb.com/yokyok citykiosk) next door has become a cult favorite for its house-label beer and backroom art gallery. After dark, there’s Amp (fb.com/ampyourself), a moody, music-centric café-bar launched by the pioneering German DJ Ata, and the chic Kinly Bar

(fb.com/thekinlybar), a dim hideaway where some of the city’s best bartenders craft experimental cocktails like a peanut-butter-and-jelly fizz infused with whiskey (never fear: if the menu doesn’t appeal, they’ll whip up a cocktail tailored to your palate). With its rock-and-roll posters and splashy color schemes, 25hours Hotel Frankfurt by Levi’s (25hours-hotels.com; doubles from $92) is the stylish place to sleep off a late night—and come morning, you can take one of their loaner Mini Coopers or bikes out for a spin. Some are wary that the escalating glitz portends a future where the Bahnhofsviertel is yet another anodyne hipsterville. “We don’t want the area to become tame,” says Daniel Schierke, who opened the contemporary Galerie Rundgaenger (rundgaenger.de) with his partner, Ralf Seinecke, in 2015. “The mix keeps things from feeling too bourgeois.” For now, it’s still proud home to both a scattering of seedy shops and the inexplicable yet charming Hammer Museum (vollderhammer.eu), where the functional tools are displayed as art and the marquee attraction is a sledgehammer that helped level the Berlin Wall. Turkish barbershops nestle next to hip-hop clubs and cigar bars like Mercedes Reyes (mercedes-reyes. com), where connoisseurs smoke hand-rolled stogies and the walls are hung with panama hats. But right across from the gallery, construction crews are erecting glossy high-rises, and the much-lauded Weinsinn Restaurant (weinsinn.de; tasting menus from $86), a fine-dining place with a modern-French sensibility, just moved in. The Bahnhofsviertel, like DomRömer, has reached a turning point, and this may be the ideal moment to see Frankfurt, its historic glory renewed, its future still unpredictable. Raphael Kadushin is a Madison, Wisconsin– based writer and editor.

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MEMORY

Hot Pursuit On a pilgrimage to Iceland’s famed geothermal springs, Amie Barrodale and her husband discover a hidden pool inside a remote cave—and the pleasure that comes with going outside their comfort zone together.

FOR MY husband, Clancy, and

birthday last year, my

I traveled from our home in Kansas City, Missouri, to Iceland. We rented a house in Old Reykjavík for eight days. We planned to visit a lot of hot springs, beginning at the world-famous Blue Lagoon. I once worked at a magazine in New York City, and a co-worker’s iChat photo was of himself at the Blue Lagoon. It looked like a dreamscape. The water was pale blue, and the surrounding land was black lava rock. In the picture, my co-worker had white foam on his face. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was soap that floated on the surface of the lagoon and gathered in rocks. You could just put it on your face. But when I got to the Blue Lagoon, I realized there were things my co-worker hadn’t mentioned. The soap was actually silica. It did gather in rocks, but so did other things, like dirt and human hair. Teenage attendants in parkas carried buckets from which they passed out clean silica, which you could use as a face mask. It felt a bit like a water park in the Midwest. The kids taking selfies and the sloppy drunks wading up to the in-water bar distracted me from the natural beauty of the landscape. We wrote to the man who’d rented us the house to ask if he could recommend a hot spring. He listed a dozen. None seemed quite right. One was, according to its website, infested with “harmless biting parasites.” One was not actually warm. Several were just large swimming pools. At the bottom of the list—because it was a five-hour drive from Reykjavík and located on private property—was Grjótagjá Cave. It was his favorite hot

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spring. “But since you have only a few days,” he wrote, “it’s really too far. Some of the roads are very rough.” I looked at images of the cave online. It was luminous, terrifying—the stuff of fantasy. We traded in our economy car for a four-wheel-drive vehicle and set out the next morning. We asked the desk clerk at our hotel near Lake Mývatn if we could swim in Grjótagjá. He looked at us squarely and said, “No, but you can look.” I had read warnings online, where people wrote with what sounded like authority that the spring had been swimmable until the late 1970s and early 80s, when eruptions from Krafla, a nearby volcano, heated the water to more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. We explained to the desk clerk that the man from whom we had rented our house in Reykjavík was friendly with the owners of the farm where the spring was located. “He swam in it after running a marathon,” we said. Like everyone we met in Iceland, the clerk was exceptionally generous and patient. He called the landowners, and they said yes, we could swim in the spring. We thought about waiting until morning to go to Grjótagjá, but reasoned we could go twice. We drove several miles to the farm. A farmer waved us in at the gate, and lambs ran alongside our car. We parked in front of the cave opening. We were the only ones there. A sign said, in many languages, that swimming was forbidden. We went inside. It was dark, and the path from the entrance down to the spring was narrow and rocky. Although it was only a bit longer than a flight of stairs, I chose my steps carefully. By the time we got to the water, I was too terrified to get in. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” I said. Clancy had already begun to remove his clothes. I pulled my sweater over my head. “Test it first,” I said. He sat on a rock and put his feet in the water. Then he lowered himself in. On the bottom of the spring were large rocks. He stepped on one, and it moved. “Be careful,” I said. He waded until only his head poked out, then turned and smiled. “Come in,” he said.

It was hotter than the hottest bath you have ever taken. I ducked my head and got some water in my mouth. It tasted pure, but an instinct told me not to swallow. We treaded water for a few minutes, then I got out and watched my husband from a rock. Before I got in, I had been very cold, but the heat from the water kept me warm for a long time. While we were there, other visitors came in and out. Most were startled to see us, knowing only what they had read on the sign, but then a young couple arrived and swam with us. They lived in America, and were staying with the landowners. As the husband splashed into the water, I noticed his thick, loamy body odor and was irritated with him for getting into the pristine spring without showering first. The water was too hot for his wife, and she sat on the rock with me. Then a group of young women came in. They had no plans to swim, but seeing tourists in the water, they stripped to their bras and underwear and splashed in the shallows. I swam one last time, and then my husband and I decided to go. Three young Japanese tourists entered the cave as we were leaving. They wore waterproof pants and down parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, and they looked at me, half naked with wet hair, as if I were a wild troll. In the car, Clancy admitted that he had scalded his leg. A jet of hotter water, maybe from the spring’s source, had caught his thigh while he was swimming. Later he said his heartbeat made strange sounds in his ears the whole ride back. We could have gone back to the cave the next day, but we didn’t. It wasn’t because we were tired or lazy, but because we were afraid. Not of Grjótagjá, exactly, but of nature. “In that cave, death sits and wonders,” I said to Clancy. Then I said, “I want to go to the bath that’s in the volcano.” This was a hot spring in the Víti crater in Krafla. Websites mentioned sulfuric acid in the water. “For some reason I don’t like the idea of acid eating my swimsuit off my body,” he said. “I think it’s only a few miles from here.” He sighed. “Tell me the directions.” Amie Barrodale is the author of the story collection You Are Having a Good Time.

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ON OUR RADAR

Working the Room

Named for its wall-size wood installation, the Map Room at Claridge’s is open to guests 24/7.

High-design hotel business lounges tap into the evolving needs and preferences of modern road warriors. By Sarah Bruning A growing segment of the global population regularly relies on coworking spaces, making the stylish shared-office models popularized by NeueHouse and WeWork more integral to the way business gets done. Hotels have taken notice and elevated their own offerings on both aesthetic and practical levels. Here, seven next-gen lounges around the world that are setting a new standard.

C O URT ESY OF C L A RI D G E ' S

THE MAP ROOM AT CLARIDGE’S

London This Maybourne Hotel Group property blends practical conveniences (trained staff and concierge; bites from the hotel kitchen; complimentary laptops, iPads, and Wi-Fi) with a refined Midcentury Modern aesthetic. Eames chairs accompany each of the three custom walnut desks, while bookshelves showcase a curated selection of limited-edition art, fashion, and lifestyle titles from Assouline. claridges.co.uk; Superior queen rooms from $829.

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THE BAR AT THE SPECTATOR HOTEL

THE LOUNGE AT CROWNE PL AZA HY36

New York City A center that’s staffed and open around the clock won’t come as a surprise in such a major business hub. Less expected? Touches that make the gathering space feel homey, including a communal table, cushy pillows as plentiful as the outlets, and visits from Wellington, the resident French bulldog. ihg.com; doubles from $283. LINA’S FIREPL ACE AT CASA LEGADO

Bogotá, Colombia Even the smallest boutique hotels are packing in big luxuries for today’s business travelers. The living-roomstyle lounge of this intimate

Guests at the Spectator can shift from meetings to after-work martinis without leaving the hotel’s bar area.

seven-bedroom retreat is equipped with universal electrical outlets and screen-sharing-enabled TVs. There’s a dedicated host to tend to everyone’s needs. The stocked fridge, robust snack pantry, and locally sourced coffee provide your crew with sustenance. casalegadobogota.com; doubles from $256. THE BOOK ROOM AND CABINET ROOMS AT THE JEFFERSON

Washington, D.C. Taking its cues from the design sensibility and interests of the third U.S. president, this Dupont Circle lounge surrounds workers with leatherbound books, wood paneling, and hand-colored lithographs from the 1800s. All three parts of the space facilitate quiet concentration, but the two Cabinet rooms—tucked behind pocket doors— offer the most privacy. jeffersondc.com; doubles from $405.

How often do airlines force people to pay to sit together—and can I avoid it?

THE HUB AT THE LINK

Tel Aviv Tech entrepreneurs accustomed to environments that fuse business and play will appreciate the amenities at this new hotel’s 7,000-square-foot collaboration space. Worktables, an all-day café, and nine private meeting rooms (fitting from four to 40 people) share the floor with gaming equipment, including a fullsize pool table. danhotels. com; opens July 2018; doubles from $192. THE HEARTH ROOM AT THE DEER PATH INN

Chicago Meeting a tight deadline might seem less daunting amid exposed wooden beams, candelabras, and a stone fireplace. Guests can fuel their workdays with light bites befitting the English-manor vibe, including tea, assorted pastries, and house-made cookies. thedeerpathinn; doubles from $319.

While the U.S. Department of Transportation hasn’t gathered statistics, splitting up passengers booked on the same reservation has become increasingly common as more airlines introduce “basic” economy service or charge for seat selection in the main cabin. Usually, carriers assign seats randomly based on computer algorithms— but since each company determines its own formula, there are varying probabilities that companions will be separated if they don’t pay a fee. To boost your odds of snagging an adjacency, book and check in early. If your seats aren’t ideal, call the airline, touting elite status if you have it. Double-check seating once you get your boarding pass, because airlines can switch passengers around if circumstances change or an emergency arises. Should a last-minute switch occur, the gate agent may still be able to help. — Cailey Rizzo

I N N OVAT I O N

Woes Be Gone No matter how much you love to travel, certain frustrations can arise before, during, and after a journey that put a damper on the experience. These companies offer cutting-edge solutions to three common traveler complaints. By John Scarpinato

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BEFORE TRAVEL

DURING TRAVEL

AFTER TRAVEL

PROBLEM Packing FIX Consider Dufl. The

PROBLEM Lines and Crowds FIX Travelers in the western

PROBLEM Flight Compensation FIX The app Service

company sends you a suitcase to fill with your must-haves, picks up the bag, launders and inventories everything, then stores it until your next trip. Create a packing list, and the items will be shipped to your end point—domestic or international. Before heading home, schedule a pickup and leave the bag with the hotel desk. dufl.com; introductory membership $9.95 monthly plus $99 per round trip.

U.S. can fly with JetSuiteX. The JetBlue partner runs regular shared charters between popular cities (a round-trip between Burbank and Oakland starts at $149) and seasonal flights to leisure spots with limited commercial options (like Bozeman, Montana). Using private terminals means you can enjoy swift boarding and planeside luggage service just 30 minutes before departure. jetsuitex.com; flight prices vary.

monitors your inbox for airline reservations, then tracks cancellations and delays based on the flight number. If a change is detected, the company automatically files a claim on your behalf. They’ll also look at the last 12 months to see if you’re owed any money from previous disruptions. getservice.com; iOS; $49 per year, or 30 percent of the cash value per claim.

C LOC KW IS E FR OM TO P: C OU RT ESY OF T H E S PECTATOR H OT E L ; C OU RT ESY OF S ERV ICE ; CO U RTESY O F J E TS U ITE ; CO U RTESY O F D U FL

Charleston, South Carolina Until 4 p.m., this Art Deco– inspired cocktail den adopts a professional air. Leather club chairs and couches provide comfortable seating options for brainstorming with colleagues or hunkering down for presentation prep with a complimentary tea or coffee. A team of butlers can lend a hand by delivering lunch, pressing suit jackets, or coordinating transportation. thespectatorhotel.com; doubles from $329.

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TA K E F I V E

Shop Better Abroad Caroline Scheeler, the creative director of Chicago-based interior-design store Jayson Home, searches showrooms, shops, and markets around the world for one-of-a-kind house wares. Here, she discusses her tricks for scoring your own treasures. By Siobhan Reid HOW DO YOU PREP FOR A TRIP?

On-the-Go Entertainment Options for Kids With summer vacations fast approaching, parents have begun plotting ways to keep young ones occupied—a task that can seem especially daunting while traveling. Many major airports across the U.S. offer clever youth-focused activities you can replicate yourself, no matter where you are or what your kids are into. By Harriet Baskas ACTIVITY

Learning About Filmmaking

AIRPORT VERSION

ANYWHERE VERSION

The Kidsport area in Pittsburgh International’s Concourse C features a video wall where kids can record short clips, plus a kiosk honoring Fred Rogers, who taped his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood TV show in the city.

The Lego Movie Maker and the Toontastic 3D apps (free; Android, iOS) both teach age-appropriate storytelling skills as they guide kids through recording videos of their own.

Understanding Aeronautics

Chicago O’Hare’s brightly colored Kids on the Fly exhibit (Terminal 2) includes a model airplane, helicopter, and control tower that kids can climb or run around.

The portable WolVol TakeA-Part Toy Airplane ($40; amazon.com) allows children to deconstruct and rebuild an aircraft to see how the pieces work together.

Interacting with Art

Eric Staller’s SpiroGyrate (in San Francisco International’s Terminal 3) comprises giant, motion-activated patterns that light up and turn when kids interact with them.

A deluxe version of the classic Spirograph Design Tin Set by Kahootz Toys ($15; bedbathandbeyond.com) lets kids mimic Staller’s mesmerizing designs.

Four-legged ambassadors (dogs at Minneapolis–St. Paul, a cat at Denver International, miniature ponies at Cincinnati/North Kentucky International) can help settle young fliers’ nerves—or provide a distraction during a flight delay.

Animal Planet’s Animals of the World Learning Pad ($25, amazon.com) introduces curious minds to more than 100 types of wildlife across 10 habitats and reinforces the new knowledge through playful quizzes.

Studying Animals

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“I try to soak up as much information about the city or place as I possibly can. I’ll ask friends and colleagues for recommendations, rifle through old magazines I’ve saved, and peruse G.Spotting, Gwyneth Paltrow’s travel app, for cool off-the-radar shops.” HOW DO YOU NARROW YOUR LIST OF STORES AND MARKETS?

“Keep your budget in mind so you’re not wasting your time going to places that are out of your range. And keep your list on the short side. You want to have time to discover spots that come recommended by the locals. I’ve gotten into the habit of striking up conversations with interesting-looking people at cafés or restaurants.” HOW CAN YOU BE SURE THAT AN ITEM IS FAIRLY PRICED?

“Frankly, it’s not worth getting too hung up on those things. The real value doesn’t matter as much as how much you’re willing to pay for it. If a piece of furniture is in my price range and I like it, I buy it. Same thing goes if it has a blemish or a slight imperfection. I’m not daunted by a fixer-upper.” WHEN DO YOU HAGGLE?

“At markets and antiques stores. I start by asking for 50 percent off and go from there.” WHAT’S THE BEST STRATEGY FOR NEGOTIATING?

“A little small talk goes a long way. Get to know the vendor you’re buying from. It also helps if you literally speak the same language—or at least attempt a few words and phrases. When you finally start bartering, do so politely and privately.”

I LLU ST RAT I ON BY JA M ES O LSTE IN . PO RT RA I T BY PA D DY MI LLS . OP P OS IT E : IL LUSTR ATIO N BY SA ND R A R ILOVA

T R AV E L INTEL

LITTLE LU X U R I ES

Savvy Ways to Enhance Your Travel Experience Even for those accustomed to elite travel, flying in an upper-class cabin or staying in a top-tier suite isn’t always an option. But no matter which seat or how much room you have, these smart tactics and small splurges can improve your routine and ensure your comfort on the road. By Melanie Lieberman

ASK FOR AN UPGRADE

Simply making the request upon arriving at your hotel could score you a superior room—especially if you’re celebrating a special occasion or visiting during the offseason, when there’s typically lower occupancy. You can expect to pay a small fee for the upgrade, but it’s often significantly less than the difference in room rate. ESCAPE TO A LOUNGE

Even if you’re not flying on a first-class ticket, you can still gain access to a first-class lounge. Many carriers offer one-day passes to their signature lounges for less than $60, while third-party retailers like Lounge Buddy also make it

possible to buy access (starting at $25). Certain loyalty programs, such as Marriott Rewards, also allow you to redeem points for a pass. BOARD A TRAIN BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE

Choosing Amtrak’s Red Cap service—a free amenity at stations in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and other big cities—comes in handy whether you have kids in tow or simply too much luggage to juggle on your own. It provides assistance with bags, which means early boarding and seat selection. PAMPER WEARY MUSCLES

Release any built-up tension with a massage or facial. Express spas offering nail care

can be found in many domestic and international terminals. And some international airline lounges house luxury spas, such as the Six Senses at Etihad’s Abu Dhabi flagship, where aestheticians specialize in abbreviated treatments (prices vary). FIT IN A FAVORITE WORKOUT

Travelers craving their boutique gym classes can sign up for Sanctifly (sanctifly.club; monthly memberships from $25), which grants entry to popular fitness centers like 24 Hour Fitness in the U.S., Europe, and (soon) Asia.

NEGOTIATE CHECK- IN AND CHECKOUT TIMES

The key to scoring extra R&R? Phone ahead and mention your membership (another reason to sign up for loyalty programs). If all else fails, ask to pay a halfday rate. Many hotels have a fixed—and not exorbitant—fee for precisely this purpose. Another trick: use Facebook Messenger or SMS (standard rates apply for the latter) to connect with SnapTravel, a free service that automatically lobbies for free upgrades on arrival and facilitates special requests like early check-in and late checkout for a commission from the hotel.

H AV E YO U H E A R D O F

hidden-city ticketing (noun) When a traveler books an inexpensive flight with a connection (rather than a pricier direct flight) and skips the final leg of his or her itinerary.

Say someone wants to fly to Austin, Texas, and finds a cheaper flight to Los Angeles that just so happens to have a connection in Austin. A traveler who books the itinerary to California and intentionally takes only the Texas leg is flying on a hidden-city ticket. The tactic can save hundreds of dollars, but it’s widely discouraged for several reasons. For one, hidden-city travelers may deprive others of a seat on the second-leg flight, or force them to pay a higher price (hello, bad travel karma). And because airlines often hold flights for connecting passengers, such travelers can cause delays. Checked luggage is

obviously out of the question, but even carry-ons can be problematic, as flight attendants sometimes gate-check bags. And if a flight plan changes and the plane doesn’t land in the scheduled stopover city, the trip is ruined. Then there are the penalties imposed by airlines. Even Skiplagged—a website that routinely promotes fares that use the practice—warns of the consequences. If customers intentionally miss a flight (and thus violate the contract of carriage), airlines can revoke their elite status, refuse to award them frequent-flier miles, and even ban them from future flights. So while hidden-city ticketing might seem savvy, the risks outweigh the rewards. — M.L.

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Shay Mitchell’s In-Flight Essentials

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AN OVERSIZE SCARF

“I love traveling with one on the plane because it’s usually freezing. They double as plane blankets.” Wilfred Diamond Mosaic blanket, $85; aritzia.com. 2

A BLACK T-SHIRT

“This is good in case you spill coffee on your shirt or want to change out of your plane clothes before arriving at the destination. A black shirt looks chic under a jacket or layers.” Paige Denim Cassandra tee, $98; paige.com. 3

BRIGHTENING SERUM

“I never leave home without this product, even in L.A. My skin feels cleaner immediately after I apply it.” iS Clinical Active Serum, $135; dermstore.com.

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AN EXTERNAL CHARGER

“It’s my number-one obsession. I love this one specifically because it has the wall charger and wires all attached so you don’t end up losing any cords. Cannot stress it enough—this guy is a lifesaver!” MyCharge HubPlus, $80; mycharge.com. 5

AQUAPHOR

“I try my best to avoid the dry, chapped lips and skin that you can get after a flight, so I’m good about applying this while I’m in the air. It’s amazing at keeping everything hydrated.” Aquaphor Advanced Therapy Healing Ointment, $5; target.com.

bring my phone safely with me in a kayak or just scroll Instagram from a hot tub, I love these cases.” Lifeproof Nëxt case for iPhone 8 Plus and 7 Plus, $80; lifeproof.com.

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A WATERPROOF PHONE CASE

“Whether I want to be able to

AN ACTUAL BOOK

“I do keep scripts and magazines on my iPad, but there’s something nice about flipping through the pages of a book on a plane. Even though I’ve read them a thousand times, I usually bring The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz or this collection of poems.” Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, $15; amazon.com. 8

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premeasured small packages, so it’s easy to toss them in your bag and apply during the flight.” Bioré Self-Heating One-Minute Mask, $6; amazon.com.

FACE MASKS

“I usually travel with these charcoal ones. They come in

BIG SUNGLASSES

“I can travel somewhere for 48 hours and still pack 14 pairs of sunglasses. My favorites to bring on a flight are larger, darker styles. They work from day to evening and are amazing at hiding tired eyes after red-eyes.” Karen Walker Deep Worship sunglasses, $250; barneys.com. 10

THICK, COMFY SOCKS

“I love getting on a plane, taking my shoes off, and putting these on.” J. Crew Boot Camp socks, $13; jcrew.com.

H E A D S HOT C O U RT ESY O F SH AY MITC H E L L . P R OD U CTS : KE V IN SWE E N E Y

The actor thrives on exploring new destinations and sharing the experiences through Shaycations, her YouTube series. This year alone, she’s set to visit Qatar, China, Israel, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates. The Toronto native and Los Angeles resident unpacks her 10 must-have items. By Sarah Bruning

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H E A V E N Blessed with a bounty of land and sublime native grapes, Swiss winemakers have been perfecting their craft for centuries. RAY ISLE discovers the crystalline vintages and steep vineyards of this great, unsung wine destination—one sip of Chasselas at a time. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON BAJADA

A view of Lake Geneva and the Lavaux vineyards from the home of Cyril Séverin, owner of Domaine du Daley. His winery dates back to 1392, making it one of Switzerland’s oldest.

The reason you won’t find much Swiss wine in the U.S. is simply this: 98 percent of it stays in Switzerland, where it’s drunk quite contentedly by the Swiss, who are well aware that their wines are extremely good, even if the rest of the world is not. This situation isn’t entirely intentional. The wines are dauntingly expensive outside Swiss borders, and the fact that they’re made from unfamiliar native varieties doesn’t help, either. A $50 bottle of Swiss Chasselas would be a tough sell in your local American wine store. That said, once you arrive within their borders, the Swiss are more than happy to share. Visiting wineries in Switzerland is actually easier than in many other European wine regions. Most have shops that double as tasting rooms and keep regular hours. Plus, Switzerland’s wine country, which includes the popular cantons of Vaud and Valais, is stare-around-you-in-awe beautiful. All that is to say why, the day after my epic dinner, I was standing with Louis-Philippe Bovard on the Chemin des Grands Crus, a narrow road that winds among the ancient Lavaux vineyard terraces east of Lausanne, in the Vaud. Bovard is the 10th generation of his family to make wine here. “I have just a small piece of vineyard, which my father gave me, which the first Louis bought in 1684,” he said with the kind of casual TH E BE AU-R I VAG E PAL ACE HOTE L in Lausanne, on the shores modesty available to you when your of Lake Geneva, maintains one of Europe’s great wine cellars. family has been farming the same Earlier in the day I’d made my way through it, a maze of 80,000 piece of land for almost 350 years. bottles extending all the way under the tennis courts, with To our left, the green vines climbed sommelier Thibaut Panas. The cool underground rooms held the in dramatic steps—some of the stone usual suspects—grand cru Burgundies, first-growth Bordeaux, walls are 20 feet high—up to bare Barolos—as well as plenty of fine Swiss wines. It was one of the rock and, eventually, the Savoy Alps. latter that I was drinking now, as I sat on the terrace at AnneBelow us they dropped equally Sophie Pic, the acclaimed French chef’s namesake restaurant at precipitously down to the ultramarine the hotel: a glass of 2007 Les Frères Dubois Dézaley-Marsens waters of Lake Geneva. Grand Cru de la Tour Vase no. 4. A Chasselas from the terraced The Chemin des Grands Crus sees vineyards of the Lavaux wine region, just outside the city, the a lot of foot traic these days, a white wine was rich, complex, and subtly spicy all at once. And it consequence of the region’s having was exactly why I’d come to Switzerland, since there was little been named a unesco World Heritage chance I would ever find it back home in the U.S. site in 2007. Bovard tolerates this with The Beau-Rivage was built on the Swiss side of the lake in 1861, equanimity. “In September there and it’s what a grand old European hotel should be, which is to will be a thousand people on the route,” say it keeps the feeling that you might at any moment drift into he said. “They get very annoyed when a black-and-white movie set between the wars. Its Belle Époque they have to move aside for my car! salons, ballrooms, and suites have played host to the likes of But harvest is harvest. The work has Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel, and countless others accustomed to be done. And the winemakers are to grandeur and privilege. Case in point: the woman in red the ones who built the road, after all.” leather pants at the table next to mine, who was surreptitiously To give perspective, Bovard’s winery feeding morsels to her miniature dachshund. The dog would is located in the nearby town of Cully, poke its snout out of her red leather handbag to receive bites of whose population tops out at 1,800 $85 duck, then disappear. It had manners. I drank my good or so. “And the other villages around Swiss wine, pondering the quirkiness of rich Europeans.

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Clockwise from left: Turi Thoma, chef at Wirtschaft zur Burg, a traditional farmhouse serving modern European cuisine on the outskirts of Zurich; bottles from Domaine du Daley, in the Vaud, which produces Chasselas and Pinot Noir; the barrel room at Domaine Jean-René Germanier, in the heart of the Valais, where visitors can taste Swiss varietal wines like Humagne Rouge and Chasselas.

here aren’t even this big, maybe three hundred inhabitants,” he added. “But of those, ten to twenty will be winegrowers.” The Dézaley Grand Cru area, which we were standing in the midst of and from which Bovard makes one of his best wines, is a tiny 135 acres, but more than 60 different families farm it. The principal grape of Lavaux and of the Vaud as a whole is Chasselas. At one extreme it makes light, delicate, floral whites; at the other, rich, supple, full-bodied ones. “In its variety of expression, it’s like Burgundy,” Bovard told me later as we sampled wines in his tiny tasting room. “Chasselas from one cru to the next can be as different as Chablis

is from Montrachet.” All of Bovard’s wines are impressive, but the standout was a 2007 Domaine Louis Bovard Médinette Dézaley Grand Cru, his top wine, its youthful fruit notes now shifting toward a layered toastiness. “As the wine ages you have less white flowers, more dried apricots, honey—much like a white Hermitage but just a bit lighter.” I was exposed to Chasselas’s chameleonic range of styles again during lunch at Auberge de l’Onde, in the tiny town of St.-Saphorin on the old road from Geneva to the Valais. The green-shuttered, 17th-century building has been an inn for most of

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Above: Langoustines and beets at AnneSophie Pic, the restaurant at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel, in Lausanne. Right: A vineyard in the village of Le Perrey, in the Valais, where the winemakers at Domaine Gérald Besse source their grapes.

The Swiss are well aware that their wines are good, even if the rest of the world is not. And they are more than happy to share.

its existence, but these days it is known mostly for its restaurant. The feel in the downstairs brasserie is homey: wooden chairs, white-painted ceiling beams, white flowers in the window boxes. (The upstairs rotisserie is more formal, and open only for dinner.) As maître d’ and sommelier Jérôme Aké Béda seated us, a young guy carrying a motorcycle helmet poked his head through a window, and he and Aké chatted in French. “He’s a winemaker, a local guy,” Aké explained. “He makes a special cuvée for me, about three hundred bottles.” Aké’s magnetic personality and extraordinary wine knowledge are this restaurant’s secret weapons. He’s also quick to note his unlikely path in life: “I’m from the Ivory Coast. I was raised on pineapple juice, not wine! But now I’m in wine because I love it. I swim in wine.” If not for a chance meeting, Aké might still be living in Abidjan, the largest city in the Ivory Coast. In 1988, when he was the maître d’ at Wafou, one of the city’s top restaurants, he went to France on vacation and ran into one of his former professors from hospitality school. They chatted for a while, and eventually the man asked if Aké might like to be on the team for a project of his—in Switzerland. By 1989, Aké had a new life in a very different country. But it wasn’t until the mid 90s, working at acclaimed chef Denis Martin’s restaurant in Vevey, on Lake Geneva, that he fell in love with wine. He began training as a sommelier and, in a remarkable ascent, by 2003 had been named the best

Below: The waterfront walking path in Lausanne offers ample opportunities for people-watching. The city is the capital of the Vaud canton and close to the Lavaux vineyards, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

sommelier in French-speaking Switzerland by the Swiss Association of Professional Sommeliers. Now he’s found his home at Auberge de l’Onde. “Chaplin, Stravinsky, Edith Piaf, Audrey Hepburn, they all came here,” he told me. But it was when he started to talk about Chasselas, not famous people, that he became truly passionate: “I have wines from everywhere in my cellar, but I’m going to talk to you about Swiss wine. And Chasselas—it’s one of the great grapes of the world. When you drink it, you feel refreshed. And it’s so subtle, so sensitive, you must read between its lines.” Right as I was beginning to wonder if I’d wandered into a novel about the Chasselas whisperer, Aké set down plates of perch from the lake and expertly spit-roasted chicken in tarragon sauce. To go with them he poured us tastes from seven different bottles, all Chasselas. Some were bright, citrusy, and crisp; some were creamy, with flavors more reminiscent of pears. Of the two older vintages we tried, one had honeyed notes, the other a nutty flavor suggesting mushrooms and brown butter. “Chasselas...it’s also very earthy,” Aké went on. “It needs salt and pepper to bring out its amplitude.” The following day I headed west in the direction of Geneva to La Côte, another of the Vaud’s six wine regions, to meet Raymond Paccot of Paccot-Domaine La Colombe. Here the land was less abrupt, the vineyards flowing down toward the lake in gentle slopes. Paccot’s winery was in Féchy, a rural village. Above it, higher on the hillside, was Féchy’s aptly nicknamed sister town, Super-Féchy, “where Phil Collins lives,” Paccot explained. “The rich people.” Even in less celebrity-filled Féchy, the local castle was currently for sale for $36.8 million, Paccot told me. “With a very nice view of the lake, if you’re interested.” Rather than buy the castle, I ended up at La Colombe’s little shop and tasting room. Paccot, one of the first vintners in Switzerland to farm biodynamically, makes a broad range of wines, both red and white—Chasselas is not the only grape grown here. He set out an abundance of charcuterie and cheeses, and surrounded by bottles, we chatted about the history of the region. As with essentially every European appellation, it was the Romans who cultivated vines here first. Later, in the 10th or 11th century, Cistercian monks established their

own vineyards. Lavaux’s spectacular terrace walls were erected in the 1400s by northern Italian masons. By then the Vaud was part of the French-speaking Duchy of Savoy; that was also, Paccot told me, around the time when his family received its coat of arms, which features a dove (la colombe), a symbol of peace, and of course the winery. “It was given to us by Amédée, one of the Savoy counts, because in 1355, my ancestor helped secure peace. Plus, it was easier to give him a coat of arms than to pay him.” Through Europe’s many wars, vignerons grew grapes and made wine here. In French-speaking Switzerland you find local whites like Chasselas, Petite Arvine, Amigne, and Humagne, together with French transplants such as Marsanne (here known as Ermitage) and Pinot Gris (here known as Malvoisie). In the eastern, German-speaking regions, reds are more popular, particularly Pinot Noir (often referred to as Blauburgunder); in Italian-speaking Ticino, Merlot dominates. Paccot’s 2014 Amédée, primarily made from the Savagnin grape, was a standout among the wines we tasted—melony and earthy, fullbodied but brightened by fresh acidity. “With Chasselas, it’s the delicacy, the lift, the fruit,” he said after taking a sip. “But with Savagnin it’s more like a mushroom. It smells the way it does when you’re walking in the forest.” THAT COMMENT CAME back to me the next day when I was, in fact, walking in a forest. But I was in the Valais, a very different place. If the Vaud is defined by the openness of Lake Geneva, Valais is defined by mountains. It’s essentially a vast gorge carved by the Rhône glacier, which before it began its retreat some 10,000 years ago stretched for nearly 185 miles and was, according to Gilles Besse, the winemaker I was walking with, “more than a mile deep. But what it left behind was this extraordinary mosaic of rocks. The soil in the Valais changes every fifteen yards—it’s not like Bordeaux.” Nor, except for that mosaic-like soil structure, is it much (Continued on page 104)

VAUD WINE REGION

Zurich

Lausanne e Geneva Lak

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EXPLORING SWISS WINE COUNTRY The cantons of Vaud, Valais, and Zurich offer all the pleasures of the world’s best-known wine destinations without the crowds. Give yourself a week to experience all three, along with the urban pleasures of Geneva.

GETTING THERE AND AROUND Swiss International Air Lines (swiss.com) offers 73 flights per week from Canada and the U.S. to Geneva and Zurich. To get between cities by train, invest in a Swiss Travel Pass (sbb.ch).Though you can visit most wineries and tasting rooms unannounced, a good option is to work with a tour company like CountryBred (countrybred.com), which plans dinners with winemakers, luxury transportation, tastings, and more. THE VAUD To explore the wine regions of the Vaud, stay in the city of Lausanne. The recently renovated BeauRivage Palace (brp.ch; doubles from $565), originally built in 1861, has spectacular views over Lake Geneva, both from its exquisitely appointed rooms and from chef Anne-Sophie Pic’s namesake Michelin two-starred restaurant. A walk along the Lavaux terraces’ Chemin des Grands Crus, just 15 minutes from Lausanne, is not to be missed. Then visit Domaine Bovard (domainebovard.com), in Cully, one of the region’s benchmark Chasselas producers. Domaine du Daley (daley.ch), founded in

1392, is in Lutry. Its terrace has the best view of all the Lavaux wineries. Closer to Geneva in La Côte, Raymond Paccot’s Paccot-Domaine La Colombe (lacolombe. ch) is another highlight. Make sure to try the three Chasselas bottlings—Bayel, Brez, and Petit Clos—all from different terroirs. I loved dining at Auberge de l’Onde (aubergede londe.ch; entrées $13– $41), in St.-Saphorin, where sommelier Jérôme Aké Béda preaches the gospel of Swiss wine and the rotisserie-grilled meats are incomparable. THE VALAIS

Hotel-Restaurant Didier de Courten (hotel-terminus.ch; doubles from $240), in Sierre, is a pleasant, relaxed base for your excursions. Thirty minutes away in Ardon, Domaine JeanRené Germanier (jrgermanier.ch) is known as one of the Valais’s best producers, both of whites such as Fendant (as Chasselas is known in the region) and reds such as Syrah. Twenty minutes southwest brings you to Gérald Besse’s (besse. ch) brand-new winery outside Martigny. Taste his impressive wines, such as the Ermitage Vielle Vigne Les Serpentines, from a vineyard planted on a

dramatic 55-degree slope. Cheese-andwine fanatics should try Château de Villa (chateaudevilla.ch; entrées $11–$55), in Sierre, not only for the raclette tasting but also for the attached shop, which stocks some 650 different wines. ZURICH AND ITS ENVIRONS

Staying in Zurich gives you access to all the attractions of the big city, but just outside lie wineries that produce lovely whites and surprisingly good Pinot Noirs. In Zurich, the Baur au Lac (baurau lac.ch; doubles from $926) is one of the great historic hotels of Europe, built in 1844— the same year its founder, Johannes Baur, started his wine business, which the hotel still runs. At Schwarzenbach Weinbau (reblaube.ch), a wine producer 15 minutes away in the town of Meilen, you can sip subtle Pinot Noirs and citrus-apricoty white Rauschlings, available nowhere else on earth. Dinner at Wirtschaft zur Burg (wirtschaftzurburg.ch; entrées $15–$30), also in Meilen, is excellent. Chef Turi Thoma relies on ingredients such as pike and hare for his brilliantly executed spins on traditional recipes. — R.I.

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SICILIAN Palermo’s Via Orologio, part of the recently pedestrianized centro storico.

There’s a new spirit of optimism in Palermo and Sicily’s far west, where the hardships of past generations are fading into memory. Exploring enlivened city streets, new museums, and renovated palazzi, Charlotte Higgins finds an island ready to show a fresh face to the world. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON WATSON

This row, from left: Francesco Colicchia, owner of Colicchia, a sweetshop in Trapani; an art installation in Palermo’s Zisa cultural quarter; Carlo Bosco and Maria Giaramidaro, proprietors of Saragó restaurant, in Trapani.

This row, from left: Busiate topped with fried potatoes at Saragó; an exhibit by Israeli artist Shay Frisch at ZAC gallery, in Palermo’s Zisa cultural quarter; Palermo’s central post office.

This row, from left: Staff at Osteria dei Vespri, in Palermo; fresh fish on the harborside in Trapani; touring Palermo in a three-wheeled Piaggio Ape.

arly evening: the perfect time for a stroll through Palermo’s centro storico. Eighteenth-century palazzi lined the streets, their windows framed by the ruffs and frills of Baroque stonework. Some were in a state of utter dilapidation, others alive with the sound of laborers bringing their stately façades back to life. From the dust-covered sidewalks, churches reared up in a profusion of carved decoration. My partner, Matthew, and I stepped inside the Oratorio del Rosario di Santa Cita and were greeted by a riot of Rococo stuccowork created by Giacomo Serpotta— a Palermitani artist who turned this interior into a theater of religious storytelling, rendering statues of the virtues and scenes from the Passion in plaster as crisp and white as royal icing.

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Above, from left: The seafront of Trapani, a medieval city on the far western coast of Sicily; boats in the harbor of Trapani. Opposite, from top: The streets of Trapani; shopping for local produce at Palermo’s Mercato del Capo.

The whole of Palermo, in fact, seemed to us a theater, the window of each store or artisan’s studio offering a snapshot of drama: a tailor in his workshop strumming on a mandolin; a confectioner’s store piled high with marzipan fruit; a shop lined with models of Padre Pio, a favorite cult figure of southern Italy identifiable by his mittens and brown cassock. It was early September, a popular week to get married in Palermo, and the guests in all their finery were hanging around outside those spectacular Baroque churches, downing coffee at nearby bars before their various ceremonies. (No one hangs around quite so stylishly, it turns out, as a Sicilian wedding guest.)

As the light began to fade, it seemed like a good idea to stop for a pre-dinner negroni. We ducked through an archway on a narrow, darkening street to find Caffè Internazionale: a slender, vine-shaded courtyard filled with scattered tables, where we were met with a friendly greeting from the owners, Italian artist Stefania Galegati and her African-American husband, Darrell Shines. As well as serving an excellent cocktail, the couple hosts concerts and art workshops in the mazelike series of rooms out back. The place was quiet the night we visited, so we chatted with Galegati and Shines as their children scampered about the courtyard in the golden light of evening. Later, feeling hungry (it’s hard not to feel hungry in Palermo), we stopped at a hole-inthe-wall named Ke Palle, on Via Maqueda, where we ordered arancini the size of tennis balls, crisp and hot on the outside, their interiors collapsing into a delicious morass of eggplant, rice, and cheese. We ate them—along with some panelle, earthy-tasting golden squares of fried chickpea batter—sitting on a bench, watching a group of boys play an intensely serious game of soccer in a square, their goalposts a fountain and a set of church gates.

I

t has not always been like this in Palermo. The very fact that we were able to stroll through the city center is evidence of a sea change, a revival driven by steady but hard-won victories against organized crime and a refreshed urban landscape. What, a decade or so ago, would have been a hair-raising walk on a series of narrow, potholed footpaths amid roaring traic and fumes is today a pleasant, pedestrianized amble, with many main streets now home to restored old buildings and intriguing new restaurants. Inhospitable streets were just one symptom of neglect in the Sicilian capital, the center of which was left derelict by decades of poverty, local government inaction, and organized crime—the work of La Cosa Nostra, or the Sicilian mafia. Mary Taylor Simeti, an American

The fact that we were able to stroll through the city center is evidence of a sea change in Palermo, driven by victories against organized crime and a refreshed urban landscape.

who came to Sicily in the 1960s and stayed, wrote On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal at the height of Palermo’s troubles in the 1980s. In it, the author portrayed a city center plagued by collapsing ancient buildings, where the Teatro Massimo, its magnificent opera house, lay closed and silent and where, above all, the community was cursed with regular mafia killings. The most notorious moments of this violent period were the assassinations of magistrates Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, both killed in 1992 while investigating La Cosa Nostra. Many other magistrates were murdered too—adding to a list of 527 “innocent,” or non-mafioso, Sicilians killed since the first murder occurred back in 1871, with the vast majority of deaths taking place from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s.

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Black fagottini with mussels, calamari, and a tomato-saffron sauce at Osteria dei Vespri, in Palermo. Above: Restaurant tables lining the streets of Trapani.

Guests at the Teatro Massimo, the restored home of Palermo’s city opera.

The Cretto di Burri, a recently completed work of land art in Gibellina, west of Palermo, built to commemorate a village destroyed by an earthquake in 1968. Above: Porta Felice, one of Palermo’s original city gates.

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The fight against the mafia has been long and arduous—and it is not yet over. The current mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, who also presided over the city in the late 1980s and again in the 90s, has been one of La Cosa Nostra’s most vocal opponents. During his current stint in oice, which began in 2012, he has been focused on transforming the image of the city from a hotbed of organized crime into an outwardlooking community that welcomes both immigrants and tourists, honoring this island’s historical position as a junction between cultures and continents. Pedestrianizing the main arteries has been part of Orlando’s mission in recent years; he is pleased, too, that Palermo’s last Gay Pride march was said to have attracted a crowd of 200,000. I met him at the town hall in Piazza Pretorio, his suite of oices splendidly palatial with their Murano-glass chandeliers, antiques, and deep upholstered sofas. He told me that for much of the 20th century, “Palermo was the capital of the mafia. It was known across the world as the capital of the mafia. The words mafia and Palermo were almost interchangeable. There were people in this chair who were friends of mafia bosses. In fact, there was one mayor who was not just a friend of mafia bosses— he was a mafia boss.” Now, however—a quarter of a century after the killings of Borsellino and Falcone—Palermo has been named Italy’s Capital of Culture for 2018, a reversal of its dark history and an achievement of which Orlando is immensely proud. The city’s bid for the title emphasized its links to the African and Arab worlds— relationships that have been central to Palermo’s identity since at least the 12th century, when its glorious Arab-Norman churches were built. (Most notable among these is the cathedral just outside Palermo in the town of Monreale, the interior of which is a golden haze of biblical stories picked out in exquisitely detailed Byzantine mosaics.) In fact, the year 2018 may prove something of a watershed for the city: from June to November it will also host Manifesta 12, one of Europe’s most important biennial art festivals, each edition of which takes place in a different city. Exhibitions and installations are scheduled in some of Palermo’s most striking locations, including a war-damaged 17th-century church, a disused theater, and the city’s glorious botanical gardens, where Matthew and I walked one afternoon among groves of bergamot, orange,

Palermo Trapani

Mozia

lemon, and citron; through 19th-century greenhouses filled with giant cacti; and past giant ficus trees with trailing aerial roots. There are some important openings in the city this year: the Palazzo Butera, for example, a lavish 18th-century building in the Kalsa district purchased in 2015 by the wealthy northern Italian Massimo Valsecchi and his wife, Francesca. It will open as a museum for their art collection, which contains works by names ranging from Annibale Carracci to Gerhard Richter. Francesco Pantaleone, the owner of one of the very few contemporary art galleries in the city, is working with the Valsecchis to stage a spectacular installation to coincide with Manifesta 12: the Norwegian artist Per Barclay will flood the palace’s stables with a thin layer of oil, creating a mirrorlike surface that will reflect its processions of columns and fan vaulting in its dark sheen. (Pantaleone and Barclay have undertaken a similar project in the past, carefully flooding a Palermitan oratory with a layer of milk, so that its elaborate Serpotta stuccowork seemed to loom from a still, pale lake.) This summer will also see the full reopening of the city’s superb archaeological museum, known as Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonio Salinas. Housed in yet another glorious palazzo, with galleries opening out onto cool courtyards, it was only partially accessible when we visited. The museum will display, among other things, sculptures from the great Greek temple complex of Selinunte, on Sicily’s southern coast. They include amazingly vivid fifth-century-B.C. reliefs, fragments of their original paint still clinging to them, that show graphic scenes from classical myth, such as Actaeon being ripped apart by his own hunting dogs. o try to get a better grasp of the impact of La Cosa Nostra on the residents of Palermo, Matthew and I took an “antimafia” tour of the city with a group called Palermo NoMafia. It was led by an activist named Edoardo Zaffuto, who, in 2004, was one of a group of exasperated friends in their 20s who began a grassroots movement against the pizzo, the “protection” payment extorted from local businesses by the mafia. Back then, he said, the mafia “was like a parasite. They were asking for money and getting it from the entire town.” It would always be relatively small, affordable amounts—the idea being that everyone would end up paying, conferring a kind of legitimacy on the practice. (Continued on page 107)

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Marsala

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EXPERIENCING WESTERN SICILY Divide a weeklong trip between Palermo and the west of the island, and you’ll have plenty of time to take in the following highlights. GETTING THERE Fly in to Palermo Airport (PMO) by connecting through Rome or another major European hub. Central Palermo is walkable, but driving is the best way to reach the western part of the island; you’ll find plenty of car-rental options near the airport.

Palermo STAY Grand Hotel Villa Igiea This 19th-century hotel is an icon of Italian Art Nouveau overlooking the Bay of Palermo. villa-igiea. com; doubles from $291. EAT & DRINK Antica Focacceria San Francesco This historic spot has been baking traditional flatbreads since 1834—making it older than the nation of Italy itself. anticafocacceria.it.

Caffè Internazionale A courtyard bar, café, and community space with frequent gallery shows and art events. caffeinternazionale.com. Ke Palle A favorite Sicilian arancini chain offering more than a dozen versions of the fried rice-ball snack. kepalle.it. Osteria dei Vespri This oldschool restaurant is a Palermo institution—as is the wine list, which features around 350 bottles. osteriadeivespri.it; prix fixe from $35. ART & CULTURE Palazzo Butera Museum This lavish residence, which houses a large contemporary art collection, will be a venue for the Manifesta 12 art biennial when it comes to Palermo in June. 8 Via Butera; 39-91-611-0162.

Palermo NoMafia Profits from these “antimafia” city tours go to an organization working to end protection payments. addiopizzotravel.it.

Salinas Archaeological Museum An expansive collection of ancient artifacts—including treasures salvaged from Phoenician shipwrecks—slated to reopen in June. regione.sicilia.it. Teatro Massimo Long dormant during the height of Palermo’s mafia troubles, the city’s grand opera house now hosts a variety of innovative productions in its famously Baroque (and acoustically perfect) space. teatromassimo.it. ZAC–Zisa Arte Contemporanee Art-world icons like Ai Weiwei have exhibited at this space in the colorful Zisa cultural quarter. fb.com/zac.zisa.

Trapani & the West STAY Baglio Sorìa Make this boutique farmhouse hotel outside Trapani your base for exploring western Sicily. firriato-baglio-soria-trapani. it; doubles from $168. EAT & DRINK Saragó This restaurant on the tip of Trapani’s harbor peninsula serves seafood-focused dishes like roasted sea bream and red peppers. sarago.thefork.rest. ART & CULTURE Cretto di Burri This striking landart project in Gibellina, an hour south of Palermo, is well worth the detour. gibellina.siciliana.it.

Museo de Satiro Sicily’s most famous Greek bronze has a new home: a small museum inside the Church of Sant’Egidio, in the village of Mazara del Vallo, south of Marsala. Piazza Plebiscito; 39-923-933-917. Whitaker Museum Take a ferry from Marsala to this museum on the island of Mozia to view treasures from the Phoenician colony that lived here in the fifth century B.C. Isola di San Pantaleo; 39-923-712-598. — Hannah Walhout

All That Glitters Though the Côte d’Azur is most often associated with glamour and celebrity, it has another side—one that’s low-key, a little rugged, and totally at one with its Provençal roots. ADAM LEITH GOLLNER

checks in to a newly reborn hotel that offers visitors a taste of the real French Riviera.

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The ocean-fed swimming pool at Hôtel Les Roches Rouges, a newly renovated resort near the town of St.-Raphaël, on the Côte d’Azur.

The words Côte d’Azur, for most travelers, conjure up a distinctive set of mental images. Rosé on a beach. Nightclubs filled with sun-kissed Brigitte Bardot types. Languid afternoons spent lounging on a yacht off the Cap d’Antibes. But there is a side to this region that couldn’t be further removed from the star power of La Croisette—that famous palm-lined boardwalk in Cannes. The French families who summer down here know exactly how to sidestep the glitzy façade, seeking out secret beaches, pine-scented cliff walks, and simple yet spectacular Provençal food. For foreign visitors, however, finding the French Riviera’s more authentic side has, for the past few decades at least, proved more diicult. Hôtel Les Roches Rouges, a striking, newly reopened resort tucked into the cliffs midway between Cannes and St.-Tropez, aims to make it a bit easier to experience the true Côte d’Azur. Until very recently, this hotel was precisely where you didn’t want to stay in Provence. A run-down, two-star place, it was stuck in the tackier reaches of mid-century France, and not in a classic, nouvelle vague way. But even at its polyestereverything nadir, the property still had a few things going for it. To start with: location. Les Roches Rouges lies in the turquoise heart of the Riviera, hovering over a tranquil inlet near the harbor town of St.-Raphaël. The hotel is named after the red rocks of the Massif de l’Estérel reserve— the 79,000-acre swath of mountainous wilderness

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P RE V IO US S P RE A D : B E N OI T L IN E RO/ C OU RTESY OF L ES R OC H ES R OU G ES . TH I S SPR E A D, C LO C K WI S E F ROM TOP L E F T : B E N OIT L I N E R O/ C OU RT ESY O F L ES RO C H ES R OUG ES; J ESS ICA A NTO L A ; B E N OI T L IN E RO/ C OU RT ESY OF L ES R OC H ES R OU G ES ; A N T HO N Y L A N N E R E TONN E

Clockwise from above: A view of the Mediterranean from a guest room at Hôtel Les Roches Rouges; shopping in Sanary-sur-Mer; torta de blea, a type of quiche made with Swiss chard, at Les Roches Rouges; the Cours Saleya food market, in Nice.

it sits alongside. You get there by driving along a road called La Corniche d’Or, or the Golden Coastal Path, which is among the most scenic drives in France. And the hotel itself has always been in sync with the landscape, set into a low cliff with guest rooms cascading down toward the sea. Nevertheless, until a couple of years ago, its fortunes were looking rocky. Then a savior came in the somewhat unlikely guise of 42-year-old Valérie Grégo, founder of the French boutique-hotel chain Les Hôtels d’en Haut. Grégo is the type of tattooed, black-clad Parisian who looks as if he’d be far more comfortable in the dive bars of Pigalle than lounging on a beach. But while searching for properties in

St.-Paul de Vence

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St.-Raphaël

Mediterranean Sea St.-Tropez

HOW TO SEE THE CÔTE D’AZUR The places to experience the French Riviera at its most authentic—from characterful hotels to local restaurants serving classic Provençal food.

GETTING THERE

Fly directly into Nice Côte d’Azur airport (NCE) from New York with Delta/Air France; from other cities, you can connect through Paris or other major European hubs. STAY

Hôtel Belles Rives This Antibes property is housed in the historic Villa St.-Louis, a favorite haunt for F. Scott Fitzgerald—who wrote Tender Is the Night here. bellesrives.com; doubles from $300. Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc Just because it’s one of the swankiest, best-run hotels in the world doesn’t mean this Antibes institution lacks personality. Not cheap, but totally worth it. oetkercollection.com; doubles from $1,480. Hôtel Les Roches Rouges After a five-star refit, this cliff-side property near St.-Raphaël aims to revive the original aesthetic—and spirit—of the Riviera. The superb Provençal food is another powerful selling point. hotellesrochesrouges. com; doubles from $250. La Colombe d’Or The Roux family has been running this inn in the inland village of St.-Paul de Vence since the days when Braque and Miró

paid for their guest rooms with art, and it remains one of the region’s most charming places to stay. la-colombe-dor.com; doubles from $310. EAT

Auberge des Maures Head to this back-alley spot in St.-Tropez for classics like petits farcis, or vegetables stuffed with ground meat. aubergedesmaures.fr; entrées $45–$107. Cours Saleya Market For the most beautiful produce in the region, visit this marché in Nice. nicetourisme.com. Kiosque TinTin This street-food stand in Nice offers a perfect pan bagnat: tuna, anchovies, hard-boiled egg, and salad on a bun. fb.com/kiosquetintin; pan bagnat $6.50. La Merenda Chef Dominique Le Stanc gave up the two Michelin stars won at his previous Nice restaurant, Le Chantecler, to open this simple Provençal spot. lamerenda.net; entrées $14–$30. La P’tite Cour About an hour down the coast from St.-Tropez, in the fishing village of Sanary-surMer, this is a great place to sample the day’s catch. laptitecour.com; prix fixe from $37.

S IVA N AS K AYO

the area, he was blown away: “When I first came to check the place out I saw this two-star hotel, and thought it was a day wasted,” Grégo confessed. “Then I opened the front door, and bam. You walk in and you feel like you’re actually in the water.” Grégo bought Les Roches Rouges and gave it a five-star upgrade, reopening the 50-room hotel last May. He wanted to create a resort where guests could peel back the glitz and experience Provence the way it’s meant to be. So he put the building’s mid-century aesthetic front and center, accentuating its floor-to-ceiling windows and long, straight lines with an all-white palette and iconic furniture like Transat chairs by the influential Modernist Eileen Gray. The spruced-up swimming pool—a basin set into the rocky cliffscape and fed by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea— is a marvel. After an afternoon spent reading under an umbrella, as pool boys delivered carafes of pastis to my fellow sunbathers and waves splashed against the rocks, I never wanted to leave. The way Grégo most sought to connect with the hotel’s history and surroundings was by emphasizing classic local food. His inspiration was a 1963 recipe book called Traditional Provençal Home Cooking by the poet René Jouveau. It isn’t so much a cookbook as an art book about how people used to live and eat in Provence—and still, occasionally, do today. “I wanted every recipe in the hotel to come out of that book,” Grégo explained. The traditional Provençal dishes I feasted on during my stay included everything from an exemplary ratatouille with rosemary honey to a perfect grand aioli, or seafood and raw vegetables with a garlicky fresh-mayonnaise dip enlivened with Menton lemons. The kitchen even offered my beloved torta de blea, a Swiss-chard pie-quiche sometimes served in a sweet, raisin-spiked iteration but here presented in savory form, topped with toasted pine nuts. And at the hotel’s beach restaurant I also found, to my amazement, a type of soup called aigo boulido, which you rarely see on menus in France anymore. An ancient Provençal specialty, the dish consists of garlic and wild herbs cooked in water, then ladled over day-old bread that’s been drizzled with olive oil. This deceptively basic-seeming broth (its name translates to “boiled water”) is so profoundly soulful and nourishing, it has given rise to a local expression: “aigo boulido sauvo la vido,” or, boiled water saves lives. Recently, however, it has become obscure, meaning lovers of traditional Provençal cuisine (the sort championed (Continued on page 106)

Escaping the crowds at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a beach just east of Nice.

Salted forest mushroom and fern pastry at Restorans 3, a contemporary bistro in the heart of Riga, the capital of Latvia. Opposite: A view of Riga from St. Peter’s Church, which dates back to the 13th century.

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L O V E ,

L I F E ,

L A T V I A

This Eastern European country is finally emerging from the shadow of Soviet rule—and embracing change and experimentation. On a romantic visit to Riga, its thriving capital, and the bucolic countryside, Boris Fishman uncovers a destination rich in experiences and ripe with promise. PHOTOGRAPHS BY FELIX ODELL

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ten-minute pause before the main course?” asked our server, Alex. He startled me. I’d never been invited by an American waiter to take more time. My girlfriend, Jessica, and I were already an hour and a half into dinner at 3 Pavaru, a modern restaurant tucked away in a former military barracks in the Old Town of Riga, the capital of Latvia. Our meal had begun with a half-dozen sauces—including smoked apple, sea buckthorn, and hempseed oil—and flakes of dried honeycomb painted directly onto our place mats and served with bread for dipping, a maneuver that should have felt pretentious, but didn’t. Then came three hillocks of local ostrich tartare, served with a duck egg and lingonberry-beer foam. We had meant to order a bottle of wine from the long, careful list, but Alex kept us busy with a local cider platonically suspended between sweet and dry. After the pause, we got duck-breast powder and translucent crisps of pig ear over pork belly, pearl barley, and quince sabayon; smoked whole-milk cheese in wild garlic sauce; and feta over black quinoa and japonica quince. And then dessert: black-sesame ice cream, burnt caramel, and a cream of citrus-spiked white chocolate accompanied by a chip of fermented garlic and several sponge cakes that tasted deeply of, well, onion. Improbably, it was magnificent. “Anna couldn’t sleep for a few nights,” said Alex, pointing to Anna Loča, the dessert chef. She waved shyly. “When she finally fell asleep, that’s what she dreamed of.” By now, despite all the culinary rigor before us, the restaurant had transformed into something like a dinner party in a private home. Alex was trying to open a bottle of cider with a huge chef’s knife. Another server was experimenting with liquid nitrogen, puffs of which periodically blew into the dining room. It was diicult to imagine this happening in New York City, where it would come with an intense amount of forethought and self-consciousness. It was 11:30 p.m. when Jessica and I finally walked out. “That may have been the most spontaneous and intimate meal of my life,” she said. We also understood why Loča might have had trouble falling asleep: there was still light in the sky. In late June in Latvia, the sun goes away for less time than it takes to have dinner.

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As a boy living in Soviet Belarus, little seemed more exotic than Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Baltic republics at the western edge of the Soviet empire. Unwilling conscripts into the Soviet system, with northern European rather than Slavic roots, the Baltics always carried a whiff of the West. My family and I went there for vacation and better-made things, like my school uniforms, which were sewn in Lithuania. I knew that after independence in 1991, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had lost no time re-modernizing. Only two hours from Helsinki by ferry, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, had even landed on cruise itineraries. But I’d spent enough time in the former U.S.S.R. I wanted to see the rest of the world. Then, in the fall of 2016, I visited Latvia and Estonia on a cultural mission for the U.S. State Department. I’d heard so much about Tallinn that it took me several days to admit that its vaunted medieval center felt like a theme park, with clusters of Finns who’d come to party, swinging steins and bellowing tunelessly outside the bars. Meanwhile, a step outside Old Town brought me into an unreconstructed gray Soviet past. Riga seemed the opposite: its Old Town was gorgeous and largely unpackaged, with real people living in it, framed by a lovely Art Nouveau central district. If Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was still refining its style, and Tallinn had rushed and succumbed, Riga was in a sweet spot. Large enough to feel cosmopolitan, but compact enough to be walkable, it had world-class design, food, and lodging at half the cost of Western Europe; an English-speaking population eager to try new things; and a singular combination of outside influences (Nordic, Slavic, Germanic). This charm did not end at the city limits. The size of West Virginia, with a population smaller than Brooklyn’s, Latvia has an exceptionally fertile countryside whose lakes, rivers, and forests have supplied seasonal treasure for centuries: sorrel, chanterelles, cloudberries, zander, roe deer. It’s also where traditional Latvian culture retreated for safekeeping during the Soviet occupation. And Riga is largely without traic, so you can find yourself flitting past pines and birches in 20 minutes. Late one night during my 2016 visit, I strolled past the canal that wends between Old Town and the central district. Night kayakers were splitting the water, and despite the October chill, multigenerational gatherings filled the lit-up outdoor cafés lining the banks. Old Town sparkled quietly behind me. A boy was trying very hard on a wooden xylophone, his older I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.

Opposite, clockwise from top left: The new building for the National Library of Latvia, designed by Latvian-born American architect Gunnar Birkerts, in the heart of Riga; the Annas Hotel, in the village of Annas, a property with a spa, a sauna, and 10 spacious suites; the Woodcraft Museum, set in Vienkoču Park, where visitors can learn about the craft of woodworking from the Stone Age to the present day; Artūrs Trinkuns, a chef at Riga’s 3 Pavaru; a boat on Riga’s City Canal, a former moat that was once used to protect the center of the city from invaders; the dining room of the Hotel Bergs, a 37-room property in the heart of the Art Nouveau district; a vintage telephone at the Corner House, the Soviet-era KGB headquarters in Riga that visitors can now tour; the library at the Latvian National Museum of Art, in Riga.

Riga is in a sweet spot. Large enough to feel cosmopolitan, but compact enough to be walkable, it has world-class design, food, and lodging at half the cost of Western Europe.

brother whispering encouragements from the curb. When I threw a euro into the boy’s hat, he lit up so hard he forgot to keep playing. Since leaving the Soviet Union for New York in 1988, I’d been looking for a way to reconnect with my past, without success. Belarus remained Soviet in all but name, but I wasn’t Soviet any more. Moscow had become Western in many ways, many less than savory. I’d more or less given up. As I stood in front of that boy, it occurred to me that I was feeling the right angle in Riga: Slavic enough, Western enough, but unglobalized and uncopied. Latvia’s sweet spot was mine, too. I made plans to return, this time with Jessica. I wanted to see what an American would make of it. She’d never been east or north of Berlin. M AR I S L A I PE N I E K S FROM CALI FOR N I A

wanted to talk. We were having breakfast in the plush but sleek dining room of the Hotel Bergs, a contemporary property just outside Old Town. Laipenieks’s family had left Latvia in 1942, when he was two, and he was returning after more than 70 years abroad. He had brought his mother’s ashes, his sons, and their sons. Four generations. He was excited, nervous, and slack-jawed. “I can’t believe…” he started saying, and just swept his hand toward the window. While Jessica heroically busied herself with a massage, I went back to 3 Pavaru to talk to Eriks Dreibants, one of the chefs. “After independence, we were all deep in exotica,” Dreibants said as we shared a plate of pinecone jam, prepared much like any other jam, only with edible pinecones playing the role of fruit. “We had kangaroo tails, antelope. Then we had fusion. Fusion confusion! Ratatouille and shrimp with…Japanese sauce! And then we thought, Enough.” Dreibants

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and several other chefs composed a manifesto, which said, among other things: “It is time to think about biologically clean products, especially from Latvia.” 3 Pavaru was the flagship incarnation of these ideas. (A sister restaurant exploring them further, Restorans 3, opened in 2015. It offers a more formal though equally delectable tasting menu. An upstairs dining room simulates the sounds and visuals of a forest.) Some of these ideas may seem familiar from the New Nordic craze. But there’s a critical difference in Latvia. No one is looking to conquer the world or become an Instagram star. Shortly before my visit, one of Dreibants’s partners had told an interviewer that he wished the Michelin Guide would stay out of Riga. “This isn’t René Redzepi,” Dreibants explained. “It’s a family business. We won’t go bankrupt because of a bad review, and we’re open to experiment and mistake without our hands shaking.” what’s out there, the more you realize that the only unique thing you have is your own culture,” Andris Rubins, a managing partner at a prominent advertising agency, told me when we met for coffee and pastries at Café Osiris, an assembly point for Riga’s creative elite. I had asked him to explain the focus on homegrown production at the galleries and boutiques I had been visiting, such as Art Gallery Putti, which focuses on avantgarde jewelry by Latvian designers, and Pienene, which highlights beauty products derived from local flora. “We have lots of history and tradition here,” he said. “But also a clean slate.” He didn’t have to point out how many of Latvia’s neighbors in Western Europe could offer only the former,

“THE MORE YOU EXPERIENCE

Jacob Dimiters, a carpenter and the founder of the Northmen, an artisans’ guild that produces axes, bows, and watches, with his family at their home in the Latvian countryside between the towns of Sigulda and Cesis.

and how many others in Eastern Europe were as concerned with nationalism as economic innovation. “A friend in London said Riga is London thirty years ago,” Lolita Tomsone, the director of the Žaņis Lipke Memorial museum, told me. (Lipke, a dockworker, became a national hero after he ferried Jews to safety during World War II.) “Not because of the culture, but because of the opportunity.” It’s an especially promising moment. This year, Latvia will celebrate the centennial of its independence from the Russian Empire, and from June through October Riga will host its first International Biennial of Contemporary Art. When I was there, Jelena Ostapenko had just won the French Open, becoming the first Latvian to capture a Grand Slam. Thousands had watched on an outdoor screen at the foot of the Freedom Monument in central Riga, a 1930s memorial honoring soldiers who died in the war of independence. The location was not accidental. During the Soviet occupation, the monument was a rallying point. That history lives on. The building that once held the local KGB headquarters, the Corner House, is now a harrowing and moving museum several blocks up Freedom Street. It’s the site of regular tours through interrogation rooms, prison cells, and execution chambers left largely unchanged since Soviet times. Riga remains almost evenly divided between Latvians and ethnic Russians, which makes a visit both surreal and poignant: surreal because Eriks Dreibants is making foam out of lingonberry beer just over there, poignant because the previously occupied are managing to live in peace alongside their former occupiers, with equal pride in their hometown, despite the uncertainty brought on by Russia’s recent efforts to destabilize former Soviet republics. The young people who fled Latvia during the 1990s are returning to help transform the country with ideas from abroad. Tomsone, the museum director, left in 1999 to pursue Jewish studies in Israel. “I went from a very reserved culture to a very confrontational one,” she said. “But that came with a lot of responsibility for each other, irreverence toward authority.” We were speaking at Pagalms, a café and bar where twentysomethings were whiling away a sunny afternoon over duck breast and cherry cider. The Latvian aesthetic is so distinctive—something Nordic and lean, something Weimar and lush—that even a board listing bathroom-cleaning times seemed like it belonged in a design boutique. Tomsone returned to Latvia in 2013. She didn’t have to wait long for a cause. The Ministry of Health was proposing a (Continued on page 105)

ESTONIA

Riga

Baltic Sea L AT VIA

LITHUANIA

VISITING LATVIA Rich in history, with a burgeoning creative scene, the Eastern European nation is only starting to hit the radar of global travelers. The perfect weeklong visit combines four days in the capital, Riga, with three more in the nearby countryside.

GETTING THERE A variety of European carriers such as KLM (klm.com) and Lufthansa (lufthansa.com) will get you to Riga, Latvia’s capital, via a stop in a major hub. LODGING When I visited Riga previously, I stayed at the Neiburgs (neiburgs. com; doubles from $165), a boutique hotel with rooms overlooking the mansard roofs of Old Town, a library that doubles as a showcase for local textiles, and a spa that can be reserved for private use, as I did every night after a long day of talks. This time, I opted for the contemporary sleekness of the Hotel Bergs (hotelbergs.lv; doubles from $250) and the sumptuous old-world style of the Grand Palace Hotel (grand palaceriga.com; doubles from $175). With its subdued palette, high-design flourishes, and refined restaurant, the Bergs, which neighbors a luxury-shopping arcade, would not be out of place in Miami. The Grand Palace evokes Vienna: chandeliers, soaring ceilings, and a staff in bow ties. The Annas Hotel (annashotel. com; suites from $140), an hour and a half from Riga, offers 10 apartment-like suites. EAT & DRINK You could visit the Riga Central Market (rct.lv/en) because it’s housed in five of the last eight World War I dirigible hangars on the planet, or because you’ll find the full bounty of Latvian food production, from the countryside to the waters. You will never have strawberries and cherries this sweet anywhere else. Both 3 Pavaru (3pavari.lv; entrées $22–$34) and Restorans 3 (restaurant3.lv; tasting menus from $49) serve modern Latvian cuisine and should be first on any gourmand’s itinerary, but for an entirely different yet equally heady experience, visit Valtera (valtera restorans.lv/en; entrées $14–$28), which prepares updated versions of

traditional food in a rustic setting. We had an excellent dessert of rhubarb purée, hazelnut meringue, rhubarb sorbet, and milk foam. EXPERIENCES No trip to Riga is complete without seeing the former local KGB headquarters, the Corner House (kgbbuilding.lv), so named because it sits at the intersection of two major streets downtown. Latvians joked grimly that the Corner House was the tallest building in the country—you could see from it all the way to Siberia. The English-language tours are often led by a guide for whom the endeavor is clearly personal.

Riga’s Old Town is a warren of mostly unexpected delights. For shopping, I suggest browsing for avant-garde jewelry at Art Gallery Putti (putti.lv/en); body-care products derived from Latvian flora (juniper shower gel, milk-thistle eye cream) at Pienene (latviangreen.com); and household items and accessories—linens, kitchenware, handbags—at Riija (riija.lv). For a traditional pirts (sauna) experience in the countryside, head to Brūveri (hotelbruveri.lv; pirts $60 per person), a hotel complex near Sigulda, which is the scenic gateway to Gauja National Park and is about an hour from Riga. Sigulda is surrounded by castles and hiking trails—for locals, it’s the Switzerland of Latvia— and has a small cottage industry of adventure sports (bungee jumping, bobsledding). And while you have to be venturesome to seek out carpenter Jacob Dimiters’s property and the workshop of the Northmen guild of ax- and watchmakers (northmen.com), you won’t regret it. He may reward your effort, as he did ours, with homemade blini with fresh cream and lingonberry preserves or a pizza from his wood-burning oven. — B.F.

(Swiss Wine, continued from page 83)

like the Vaud. Here, the Alps towered up on either side of me, jagged and stunning. The previous day I’d had a conversation with Louis-Philippe Bovard and a Swiss wine-collector acquaintance of mine, Toby Barbey, about the difference between the Vaud and the Valais. Bovard had said, “The Valais, well, the soils are very different, the climate is very different, it’s very dry.” At this point Barbey interjected, “And the people are very different! They’re lunatics over there.” I told Besse this and he laughed. He is trim, in his forties, with the requisite interesting eyewear and expensive watch that all Swiss men are apparently issued at birth. An accomplished skier, he’d recently completed the Patrouille des Glaciers, a frigid, all-night, cross-country-ski race covering some 70 miles from Zermatt to Verbier. Proof enough of a lunatic streak for me. His family’s winery, Domaine JeanRené Germanier, opened for business in Vetroz in 1886. But at the moment we were deep in the precipitous Val d’Hérens. The forest we’d walked through gave way to one of his prized vineyards, Clos de la Couta. It is absurdly steep—your average mountain goat would be daunted. But somehow Besse harvests grapes from it, and very good ones at that. His peppery, nectarine-scented 2015 Clos de la Couta Heida (the local name for Savagnin), which we tried later on, was sublime. He also informed me that Val d’Hérens’s true fame comes less from its grapes than its fighting cows. “Fighting cows?” “Of course! Really angry animals. A top cow might sell for eighty-five thousand dollars, you know.” “Not like a bullfight, right?” “No, the cows fight each other. It’s to determine the queen—which lady

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rules the herd. There are many fights, but the finale is in Aproz in June. It’s a very big event. People come from all over Switzerland.” Visual confirmation would have helped me wrap my brain around the concept. But for dinner we did indulge in an equally Valaisian tradition, raclette, at the ultimate destination for it, the Château de Villa, in Sierre. It’s easy to look at raclette and think, “Well, that’s melted cheese on a plate.” And yes, raclette is basically melted cheese on a plate. But sit outside at Château de Villa on a spring night, looking at the turreted tower and white walls of this 16th-century building, and order the dinner tasting of five different cheeses from five different alpages (high mountain pastures) throughout the Valais. You will realize it’s much more than that. At Château de Villa, the raclette master slices great wheels of Raclette de Valais AOC cheese in half, mounts them on metal racks, and positions them just close enough to a fire that the edge of the cheese crisps and the center melts without burning. He then scrapes the molten cheese onto a plate with a single stroke. Some cheeses are more earthy, some more oily, some more floral. All are distinct. After you try all five, you can have more of whichever you prefer, along with “light” accompaniments: boiled potatoes, bread, and pickles. And ask for the pepper mill. The correct amount of pepper? That, Besse told me, is a matter of debate. TH E N E XT DAY I took the train to Zurich, because of a new rule I’ve decided to apply to my life: if someone offers to show you vineyards from a speedboat, always say yes. The someone in this case was Hermann Schwarzenbach, the debonair owner of Schwarzenbach Weinbau, a few miles south of the oicial city limits in the town of Meilen. Zurich’s not really known as a wine region—the city itself is too dominant, with its focus on international business and the arts— and as the villages on the northern shore of Lake Zurich have been absorbed into its sprawl, the historic line between what’s urban and rural has blurred. But the vineyards are still

there, semi-hidden. Schwarzenbach pointed them out from the water— dozens of one-acre parcels up and down the lake, tucked in between stands of old plane trees, riverside parks, and the gabled summer homes of rich Zurichers. “Most of them are on land that’s protected against development,” he noted. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be there anymore.” After zooming up and down the lake several times, we parked the boat in Schwarzenbach’s boathouse and repaired to lunch in the garden at a local restaurant, Wirtschaft zur Burg, to taste his wines. Though the building dates back to the mid 1600s, chef Turi Thoma is known for his lightly modernized takes on traditional Swiss dishes—pike from the lake simply roasted but served with a poppy, lime, and chile butter, for instance. Thoma, a compact, bald fellow with an impish smile, also buys all the wine for the restaurant. He joined us to taste Schwarzenbach’s 2008 Meilener Pinot Noir Selection. Pinot Noir is a more significant and increasingly popular red grape in German-speaking Switzerland than in the French areas, and the wine was a revelation—full of black tea and spice, intense dried-cherry fruit, juicy acidity. “You can really see the similarities to a great Côte de Nuits,” Thoma said. “You like the food?” “Great!” I said. “Brilliant.” He was giving me that intent look that chefs give you when they feel like you might be politely hiding your actual opinion, so I ate another bite of the venison course we were on for emphasis. “And fantastic with the wine, too.” “Good,” he said, leaning back. I said I was surprised to find Pinot Noir—and very good Pinot Noir at that—by the shores of Lake Zurich. “Yes,” Schwarzenbach said thoughtfully. “But think about it. The tradition of Pinot Noir here is over four hundred years old. Perhaps even longer. It was always our main variety of red wine. Classic cool-climate reds, that’s what we do. Yes, it was brought here by the...oh, the duke of whatever. But it’s our variety. Right?” Ray Isle is the wine and spirits editor of Travel + Leisure and the executive wine editor of Food & Wine.

(Latvia, continued from page 103)

law that would allow a woman to donate eggs only after having given birth to a child. “So I organized a demonstration,” she said. “I got a hundred phone calls: ‘How could you do that?!’ But we succeeded. The minister of health was fired the following week. Then I got a hundred more phone calls asking: ‘How do I organize a demonstration?’ ” in Riga, it was time to make like proper capital dwellers, who often escape the city on the weekends. Before we left, I had coffee with Mike Collier, a British writer and journalist who moved to Latvia 11 years ago and makes his home deep in the countryside. He told me to expect a different kind of serenity. “If the Latvian tourism board could box up peace and quiet, they’d make a fortune,” he said. “You can walk those forests all day without meeting one person.” The taxi to the Annas Hotel, an hour and a half into the woods in the village of Annas, cost all of $74. Eventually, the butter-smooth highways gave way to gravel. For miles we passed such lovingly tended but modest wooden country homes that when the hotel finally appeared out of nowhere, Jessica and I both laughed in disbelief. An elegant manor, the Annas has landscaped grounds, a spa complex, and a space in the parking lot to accommodate helicopters. We had arrived late, and plates of trout salad and smoked meats and cheese awaited us, accompanied by triangles of dense, sweet focaccia. The next morning, I went to see Jacob Dimiters, a carpenter and leatherworker who recently organized local artisans into a guild called Northmen. They produce axes forgewelded in the Viking way, bows with

AF T E R O U R T H R E E DAYS

horse-tail strings, and watches made with bog-harvested 7,000-year-old oak. (The bogs preserve the oak so well that seeds Dimiters discovered in one hollow sprouted a new tree when exposed to light.) The axes retail for up to $2,000, and the waiting list, primarily from the United States, is four years long. Dimiters was working as a film editor in Riga when he remembered a childhood wish to build a home from scratch using only hand tools. “When you sit in front of a computer, you can’t touch your work,” he said. “My question was, ‘What can you do with only your hands? How strong were our ancestors?’ Because I think we’re becoming weaker and weaker.” A local carpenter got him started, and his mistakes taught him the rest. The guild idea came next. On another part of his property, he’s constructing a workshop that will include a public showroom for its wares and philosophy. When I visited, he was preparing to host the guild’s first apprentice class, a 10-day timber-framing and log-building course in the barn of a nearby manor house, complete with three organic meals a day. “We live in a throwaway society,” he said. “The aim is to make things that will outlast us. A carpenter transforms nature into culture.” JESSICA AND I HAD BEEN L ATE

checking in to the Annas because we had stopped at Brūveri, near the town of Sigulda, for a pirts, the Latvian version of the steam bath that I’d grown up with in Belarus. I had been going with my father since before I could walk, but in Latvia the experience comes with a dose of the pagan. First, the private sauna attendant, a demonically handsome man with ice-white hair, cerulean eyes, and not one but two chin dimples, plied us with tea from local herbs and honey to open “half the pores.” (“The rest are inside you,” he said.) Then he began to discuss astral fields. A staticky radio behind him was blaring “One Way Ticket” by the 70s disco stars Eruption. “If the astral field is open…” he began, the blue pools of his eyes gleaming as his face spread into an ambiguous smile.

“How do I open mine?” I asked, a little too eagerly. “That’s why we’re here today,” he said. He studied me. “Don’t worry, I don’t get a heavy feeling from you.” I brightened, feeling like a psychologist had told me there wasn’t much to discuss. But then he added: “Some people fake it, though.” To the receding strains of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream” and Jessica’s semi-alarmed gaze, I vanished into the sauna. “We are children of the sun,” he said as he rubbed me with a mixture of honey and salt. I was prostrate on a bed of impossibly fragrant leaves. “Pirts is the world’s oldest solar power. The person who goes once a week doesn’t get sick.” Then he began swatting me with a bouquet of birch, oak, rowan, linden, and hazel leaves. There were various kinds of bouquets, each with a different job. Jessica’s, for instance, had more linden because “God gives woman more energy, and linden brings it down. Otherwise,” he said, quoting a folk saying, “at home it’s a riot instead of peace and quiet.” I had never breathed in such an unadulterated scent of the woods. The first thing the man saw rising out of my astral field as he swatted me was a rainbow. Then a water demon. Then I was riding a turtle. Things started more ominously for Jessica, whose astral field sent up a clock going backward, then barbed wire. Then, more encouragingly, she walked a tiger on a leash. Afterward, we were gently wheeled around the cool water of a nearby pond and left to lie in the grass of a meadow, the sun shining down softly. After what could have been 10 minutes or an hour, Jessica sprung from her reverie, stirring me from mine. “This place is so gentle,” she exclaimed, and went back to sleep. I stayed awake, thinking. Since we’d met, I’d wanted so much to share with her something of my past. Finally, I’d found a version of it that had made beauty out of the darkness. Boris Fishman is the author of the forthcoming food memoir Savage Feast and a frequent contributor to Travel + Leisure.

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by iconic cookbooks like Richard Olney’s Lulu’s Provençal Table or Mireille Johnston’s Cuisine of the Sun) usually have to content themselves with cooking it at home—as I do— if they want to taste the real flavors of southern France. The dish came in a large earthenware tureen so eyecatching, a woman a few tables over came by to ask what I was eating. When I explained what it was— water with garlic and bay leaves poured over slices of yesterday’s baguette—she didn’t seem convinced. Fair enough, I told her, but in a place as image-obsessed as the Côte d’Azur, it’s always worth remembering that appearances can be misleading. THE FRENCH RIVIERA wasn’t always

an exclusive destination. Historically, it was known as a poor, rustic stretch of coast where residents made a living growing olives, herding goats, and netting mullets. Then, in the late 19th century—the dawn of the Belle Époque—the railroad arrived, bringing well-heeled visitors from Paris and London in search of balmy climes. Queen Victoria was among the early adopters to holiday on the Riviera, and by the 1930s, the pineclad cliffs of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat bristled with grand villas built as summer homes for the aristocracy. Other towns took longer to catch up— when St.-Tropez made an appearance in Bardot’s 1956 breakout movie And God Created Woman, it was still a fishing village. But as the Cannes Film Festival, founded in 1946, grew into a global event over the second half of the last century, it cemented the region’s glamorous reputation. Today it is the most visited region of France after Paris. It’s become the sort of place where Russian oligarchs and music moguls compare

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mega-yachts in the marina, while the rest of us sigh over $55 plates of salad on the promenade nearby. Indeed, so many people want to travel to the Côte d’Azur that there’s been little incentive for the local hospitality industry to do things well. It’s not that there aren’t exceptional places to stay—more that the standouts have been around awhile. Take La Colombe d’Or, a legendary inn a half-hour drive inland from Nice that, since it started life as a café/bar in 1920, has attracted an extraordinary list of artists and luminaries (a number of whom, such as Picasso and Chagall, left behind masterpieces that still hang on the hotel walls). There’s also the impossibly regal Hôtel du Cap-EdenRoc, the model for the Hôtel des Étrangers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. When I stopped in for a drink one night, I found the bar populated by a riotous mix of European royalty and aging rock musicians. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, used to stay nearby at a private villa that has since been converted into the Hôtel Belles Rives, which remains an idyllic place to drink a gin and tonic while admiring a pink-hued sunset over the coast of Juan-les-Pins. At the same time, classic Provençal cuisine has become much harder to find—though if you know where to look, you can still find inviting spots to score legit petits farcis (stuffed vegetables), a fine pissaladière (anchovy-and-onion flatbread), perhaps even a non-bogus bourride (aioli-spiked fish stew). When I wasn’t exploring the menu at Les Roches Rouges, I made excursions to a few nearby restaurants. In the beachside town of Sanary-sur-Mer, I ate at La P’tite Cour—named after the small courtyard at the back where diners are seated. It was crowded with locals devouring one of two set menus of home-style cooking, which that day included a spectacular fish special of daurade royale, or gilthead sea bream. Then there’s the Auberge des Maures, in St.-Tropez. At this storied restaurant, where the surrealist Paul Éluard was famously married in 1950 with Pablo Picasso as a witness, a singer sat in a corner crooning dreamy French pop songs

while I dined on hearty standards like daube de boeuf (beef stew) and artichokes à la barigoule steamed in a white wine broth. In Nice, Kiosque TinTin is the go-to place for a pan bagnat, that niçoise-salad-on-a-bun deserving of global renown. It’s not far from the excellent Cours Saleya market, where the city’s best chefs—such as Dominique Le Stanc, who runs the cozy La Merenda restaurant, just a couple of blocks back from the beach—stock up on Provence’s famously sun-kissed produce. Market stalls here also sell panisse and socca, addictive regional snacks made from fried chickpea flour batter. THERE’S A LINE in the opening of Traditional Provençal Home Cooking that suggests that even if Provence should lose touch with its identity, it will always be able to rediscover itself: “The soul of the old country is not quite yet dead; the hour approaches when it will be reborn.” Returning from my culinary wanderings to Les Roches Rouges, with its Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack and bedside reading material by Jean Cocteau, I got the sense that the hotel aspires to be a part of that rebirth. “In their wisdom,” the book continues, “these people have been so adept at acclimatizing themselves to poverty that they discovered through it the grandeur of simplicity.” The grandeur of simplicity: It’s a beautiful idea, and to me, encapsulates everything that is special about this region. Food isn’t the only way in which Les Roches Rouges evokes this grandeur of simplicity. There’s also its relationship to the inland landscape known here as the arrière pays, in the form of the Massif de l’Estérel nature reserve. Grégo wants to encourage guests to take hikes, so each room at the hotel is outfitted with a walking stick. These beautiful olive-wood staffs are lacquered to a deep brown hue, and are objets very much of this place. On Sundays, a state guide offers tours of the park; there are also maps of its trails in each room for anyone wanting to explore on his own. Inspired by the wooden stick, I set out one morning and quickly found

myself surrounded by a uniquely Provençal ecosystem known as garrigue: a resiny, piney, sagescented agglomeration of low-lying bushes and perfumed herbs. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, notes of garrigue accentuate the region’s wines.) There were endless tufts of wild fennel, sprawling rosemary patches, brittle thyme bouquets, and dusty outcroppings of what I can only describe as a feral lemon verbena— all far more potent and sticky than the domesticated versions we’re familiar with. These were not just any herbs: they were genuine herbes de Provence, the real thing, free for the picking. And they were all sprouting from an epic Death Valley– style landscape of sunbaked porphyry rocks the color of rouille, that rusttoned saffron aioli so critical to the region’s famed bouillabaisse stews. As I hiked, walking stick in hand, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of Provence à l’ancienne. I could see myself coming here regularly, maybe becoming one of those wizened, wise-cracking guys who goes to play an early-evening game of pétanque in the town square. The French are masters in the art of whiling away time. When French visitors come to the Riviera, their days are filled with reading and eating and chilling by the pool—perhaps even one as Instagrammable as Les Roches Rouges’s. Occasionally they rouse themselves to search out the best beaches along the coast. When I did the same, the sandy shores of Beauvallon and the car-free island of Porquerolles were my best discoveries. Spending time here, you realize that the French tradition of a monthlong summer vacation makes complete sense. If I ever make it back to the Riviera—and I’m pretty sure I will—there will need to be room in the schedule for an inordinate amount of hanging out. But that won’t be too complicated, now that I’ve finally uncovered the genuine, life-airming side of Provence I’d always suspected was there—but just didn’t quite know how to find. Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters and is a frequent contributor to Travel + Leisure.

(Sicily, continued from page 91)

In the beginning, he and his friends staged guerrilla actions— pasting posters around the city that proclaimed, “An entire people who pays the pizzo is a people without dignity.” Over time they transformed themselves into a consumer movement. Now their organization, Addiopizzo (“good-bye extortion”) has around 1,000 signed-up restaurants, shops, and other businesses that resolutely refuse to bend to the criminals. (An orange sticker in the window with the slogan “Pago chi non paga,” or “I pay those who do not pay,” identifies these establishments.) Zaffuto’s tour began outside the elegant Teatro Massimo—now home to a flourishing opera company. The program has included a staging of the Italian classic Rigoletto by the ItalianAmerican actor and director John Turturro, as well as more adventurous repertoire such as Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s infrequently performed The Hand of Fate. Looking up at the building’s grand Neoclassical exterior, it was hard to imagine that from 1974 to 1997 the theater stood empty, supposedly under renovation, but really the victim of the city’s mafia-induced sclerosis. But the mafia, Zaffuto cautioned, is far from wiped out. We followed him through narrow alleyways between the tumbledown buildings that frame the Mercato del Capo, Matthew and I eyeing hard ricotta salata, tiny ferocious chiles called denti di diaboli, and salted Pantelleria capers to take home. As we entered the market proper, Zaffuto pointed out a stall owner—his table a glut of green basil, Romanesca cauliflower, and comically long, pale-green cucuzze, or Italian zucchini—who had aixed a crude cardboard sign to

his table announcing the murder, the previous week, of his brother, a victim of an ongoing internecine struggle between criminal factions. The tour ended, as all Sicilian walks should, with the promise of hearty food—this time at the Antica Focacceria San Francesco, where it was easy to forget Sicily’s troubled history amid plates of sharp-sweet caponata made with eggplant, tomato, and plenty of celery. For meat lovers, there were pani ca’meusa, or rolls stuffed with fried veal spleen and sprinkled with ricotta. he cultural rebirth that Palermo has enjoyed in recent years has begun to spread to Sicily’s far west, traditionally the wildest, poorest, most mafia-dominated part of the island—and, as a result, less of a tourist destination. But today, amid the undeniable hardship that characterizes life in Italy’s extreme south in the long wake of the European debt crisis, there are signs of revival here, too. We began a tour of the region by driving to the Belice Valley, where, in 1968, the village of Gibellina was destroyed by an earthquake. It was afterward rebuilt as Gibellina Nuova on a new site, with the help of an array of prominent artists and architects. One artist, the Umbrian Alberto Burri, turned his attention to the ruins of the old town, intending to transform it into Cretto di Burri, a vast piece of land art. In the 1980s funding for the project ran out, and the work lay unfinished until 2015, when, to commemorate Burri’s centenary, his vision for the place was finally completed. Burri’s idea was to encase the ruins of Gibellina’s buildings in blocks of hard, gray concrete, leaving its roads and alleyways clear, so

T

Content in this issue was produced with assistance from Baur au Lac; BeauRivage Palace; Crystal River Cruises; Frankfurt Tourist & Congress Board; German National Tourist Board; Grand Palace Hotel; The Gritti Palace, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Venice; Hotel Bergs; Hôtel Les Roches Rouges; and Switzerland Tourism.

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(Sicily, continued from page 107)

that the whole place is, in effect, a maze. Seeing it from afar, as we approached on roads that snaked through fields and vineyards, it resembled a rhomboid handkerchief draped over the hillside. Walking inside, we quickly lost ourselves among its winding paths. Everything was silent but for the thwunk-thwunk of a nearby wind turbine. Tendrils of caper plants forced their way through the concrete, a reminder that one day nature will reclaim this modern ruin, a strangely solemn monument to a lost town. To explore Sicily’s far west, we stayed in the Baglio Sorìa, an 11-room hotel—or perhaps more accurately a restaurant with rooms— owned by a local winegrower. The building is converted from a 17th-century baglio: the typical walled, gated farmhouse where landowners once lived with their servants, its rooms laid out around a central courtyard. Surrounded by groves of mulberry and pistachio trees, Baglio Sorìa is a pleasant refuge, with simply furnished rooms, a peaceful pool, and a courtyard bar. We dined on the terrace, feasting on local dishes refined to perfection. The carpaccio of shrimp with candied melon and eggplant caviar, followed by linguine with sea urchins harvested that morning, was particularly memorable— especially with an accompaniment of a minerally, almost salty white wine from the hotel’s vineyards on the nearby island of Favignana. From the Baglio, we took many pleasant outings: to the town of Mazara del Vallo, for example, home to one of Italy’s biggest fishing fleets, which has dozens of fish restaurants lining its seaward edge. The town’s churches are built in a warm golden tufa, its little parks are dotted with palm trees, and its Kasbah district is a warren of alleyways reflecting the footprint of the town established here by Arabs in the ninth century. Mazara del Vallo is just one of several picturesque coastal towns in this part of the island; there is also Marsala, home of the famous wine. And there is Trapani, a delightful, sleepy town built

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on a spit of land narrowing into a point, like a comma, as it stretches out into the sea. We wandered toward this waterbound tip along the centro storico’s main street, the elegant, arrow-straight Corso Vittorio Emanuele, passing Baroque and Art Nouveau façades on either side and glimpsing slices of twinkling blue sea through the side streets. Turning down one of these, we couldn’t resist the mountains of pastries and cakes piled in the window of a traditional pasticceria. We tried a paradiso— a rum-soaked sponge covered with a layer of latticed golden marzipan, which lived up to its name. On a small island nearby is the town of Mozia, successive home to Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks. Its most recent full-time inhabitants were the Whitakers, an Anglo-Sicilian family who produced the Marsala wine the British liked so much in the 19th century. The little island is a 10-minute boat ride from the mainland, and as you look back to the shore, you can see old salt pans spread behind you and white pyramids that, from a distance, resemble giant gazebos but are in fact hillocks of sea salt. The whole island, which is partially covered in vines and scrub, is an archaeological park, and the Whitakers’ villa, charming and somewhat oldfashioned, is its museum. The standout object is the Motya Charioteer, a gorgeous fragment of fifth-century Greek sculpture found by workmen during an excavation in 1979: it’s an extraordinarily sensuous

object, with stony fabric clinging to the figure’s hips and thighs. The soil and sea of Sicily seem endlessly to produce such treasures: another, even more impressive ancient Greek sculpture is the bronze Dancing Satyr, literally fished from the Strait of Sicily in 1998. After years of study and conservation— not to mention trips to exhibitions in Rome, Paris, and Tokyo—it finally has its own excellent, brand-new museum, the Museo de Satiro, in a converted 16th-century church in Mazara del Vallo. Though it is missing its arms and one of its legs, it is still a compelling object, the figure seeming to whirl in a frenzy of ecstatic dance, his head thrown back and hair streaming behind, his body twisting, his eyes staring. The sculpture is beautifully displayed, while a film explains the fascinating process of its discovery and the painstaking work of conserving it. (A former mafia boss, now collaborating with the authorities, recently admitted that he was ordered by his superiors to steal it and sell it through Switzerland, according to the Sicilian press. Happily, the order was never carried out.) There in the cool of the gallery, it struck me that the sculpture is an apt metaphor of Sicily itself: ancient, battered, subject to the reversals, near misses, and catastrophes of history—and also spellbinding in its power and beauty. Charlotte Higgins is chief culture writer for the Guardian and the author of several books on ancient Greece and Rome.

Travel + Leisure (ISSN 0041-2007). May 2018, Vol. 48, No. 5. Published monthly 12 times a year by Time Inc. Affluent Media Group, a subsidiary of Time Inc. Time Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Meredith Corporation. Principal Office: 225 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281. TRAVEL + LEISURE is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries. Subscription: 12 issues, $45.00; in Canada, $57.00 (publisher’s suggested price). Single copies $5.99. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Publications Mail Commercial Sales Agreement No. 40036840 (GST #129480364RT). Publications Mail Agreement 40036840. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Travel + Leisure, P.O. Box 134, Stn. Main, Markham, Ontario L3P 3J5. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright ©2018 Time Inc. Affluent Media Group. All rights reserved. Nothing may be reprinted in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. Member of the Alliance for Audited Media. Subscriber Services, U.S. and Canada Direct all inquiries, address changes, subscription orders, etc., to Travel + Leisure, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120, or call 800-888-8728. Editorial Office, 225 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281; 212-522-1212. Subscribers If the postal authorities alert us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Your bank may provide updates to the card information we have on file. You may opt out of this service at any time. Postmaster Send change of address to: Travel + Leisure, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. Occasionally, Travel + Leisure makes portions of its magazine subscriber lists available to carefully screened companies that offer special products and services. Any subscriber who does not want to receive mailings from third-party companies should contact the subscriber services department at 800888-8728 or write to TCS, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. The magazine assumes no responsibility for the safekeeping or return of unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other material. To order back issues, call 800-270-3053. To order article reprints of 500 or more, call 212-221-9595.

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“I SPENT 30 MINUTES GOING UP AND DOWN THIS SPIRAL STAIRCASE. My family and I were leaving the Vatican Museums in Rome when we encountered it. At any other museum, you’d exit via an elevator or back stairwell. Only in Italy do you depart in such style! I was captivated by the swirling shape and wrought-iron detailing. Much to the dismay of my wife and daughter, I was relentless in my pursuit of the perfect shot. I normally print in color, but I decided to develop this in black and white. A staircase this beautiful deserves a little bit of drama.” —Reader Thai Dang on his photograph, shot with a Canon EOS 6D, June 2016.

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Thai Dang was a contestant in our 2017 photo contest. Submit your best shots at travelandleisure.com/ photos/photo-of-the-day for the chance to be featured on this page in a future issue.

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