Italy
Val d'Orcia
Cypress-lined roads through golden fields, the landscape Renaissance painters used as their backdrop.
The road unspools between golden wheat and dark cypress lines, every rise composing another view a Renaissance painter would claim. The light does something specific here. Ordinary farmland comes out looking art-directed, and it has since the fourteenth century.
Val d'Orcia is a UNESCO cultural landscape stretching between Montalcino, Pienza and San Quirico, its clay hills and lone farmhouses painted into Western art since the Trecento. Montalcino anchors the western edge with Brunello, a red aged for years before it may carry the name. At Bagno Vignoni the village square is a steaming thermal pool, walled in the Renaissance and never built over, while the Romanesque abbey of Sant'Antimo stands alone in the fields below Montalcino. Through it all runs the Via Francigena, the medieval pilgrim road from Canterbury to Rome, signposted between the hill towns.
Couple
Drive without a fixed plan, stop wherever the view insists, and eat pecorino in whichever village you land in.
Solo
Walking or cycling the Francigena between the hill towns turns the landscape's rise and fall into something close to meditation.
Family
Open country, warm pools at Bagno Vignoni and cheese tastings in Pienza balance open space and discovery with no screens involved.
Friends
A Montalcino tasting, a long Pienza lunch and thermal water at sunset: the slow indulgent trip groups do best.
- UNESCO lists the whole cultivated valley as a cultural landscape, farmland as heritage.
- Bagno Vignoni's main square is a pool of steaming thermal water, and has been for centuries.
- Brunello di Montalcino pours at the estates along the valley's western rim.
- The Via Francigena pilgrim route crosses the valley, walkable town to town.
Pici all'aglione, heavy with garlic-tomato sauce, is the valley's workhorse lunch.
Ribollita, the twice-cooked bread-and-bean soup, fills whatever gap the walking made.
Tsavo National Park
Kenya
Red elephants ghost through rust-coloured scrubland where man-eating lions once stopped the railway.
Amboseli National Park
Kenya
Elephants wade through swamp grass with Kilimanjaro's snow-capped peak floating above the haze.
Tarangire National Park
Tanzania
Elephants in their hundreds crowd a shrinking river beneath thousand-year baobabs.
Masai Mara National Reserve
Kenya
Over a million wildebeest thunder across crocodile-thick rivers in Earth's greatest land migration.
Val di Funes
Italy
Green valley floor rising to jagged Odle peaks, the view that defines the Dolomites.
Alpe di Siusi
Italy
Europe's largest high-altitude meadow, wildflowers to the horizon beneath Dolomite spires.
Altopiano del Renon
Italy
Boulder-capped clay towers spike out of the pines, the tallest earth pyramids in Europe.
Procida
Italy
Pastel houses stacked above a fishing harbour that no car can reach.