Italy

Italy is the country travellers think they know before they arrive, and the country that quietly undoes that assumption once they do. It became a single nation only in 1861, and it still reads as a federation of regions — each with its own cooking, dialect, landscape and idea of itself.

The headline cities need little introduction: Rome's layered millennia, Florence and the Renaissance, Venice improbably afloat. But the more rewarding Italy is often the regional one — the hill towns and vineyards of Tuscany, the Dolomites' pale peaks, the Amalfi Coast's vertical villages, Sicily's Greek temples, the lakes of the north. Milan, the country's working capital of design and fashion, rewards the traveller who treats it as more than a transit hub.

The food, of course, is the through-line, and it is relentlessly regional — the right dish is almost always the local one, eaten where it was invented.

April through June and September into October are the country at its most coherent: warm without the August furnace, the cities and cellar doors working at full tilt, the light doing what the postcards promise.