Northern Italy is one of the most rewarding parts of Europe to travel slowly through – that is, if you know which parts to avoid and which parts everyone else is missing entirely. One of the most popular regions on the continent thanks to its picturesque scenery, charming towns and rich culture, it certainly has plenty to offer – but heavy crowds and intense heat can quickly detract from the experience.
Here, we take a closer look at how to do Northern Italy right. It’s not about skipping the highlights, but timing them right – and getting off the beaten track to some of the lesser-known spots that often, are the ones that leave the biggest impression.
Skip the Lakes in August
Lake Como and Lake Garda are genuinely beautiful and bucket-list worthy destinations to visit
Lake Como and Lake Garda are genuinely beautiful and bucket-list worthy destinations to visit – but they are also heaving from June through August with a combination of day-trippers, weekend visitors, and package tourists that makes the experience of being there feel more like an endurance test than a holiday. The villages that looked so peaceful in the photographs are navigable only in single file, the restaurants have waiting lists, and the roads around the lakes move at a pace that makes cycling look fast – and these things together can quickly put a dampener on the idyllic break you had in mind.
The fix is simple: go in May or late September. The water is still there, the mountains behind it are still there, the villas are still there, but the crowds have thinned to a level where it becomes possible to actually experience the place rather than simply be in it alongside several thousand other people trying to do the same thing. A Tuesday morning on Lake Iseo in late September, with mist on the water and almost nobody else around, is a completely different proposition from a Saturday afternoon on Lake Garda in July. And, with warm, sunny weather from spring through until autumn, visiting outside of the main summer months is a no-brainer.
Use Bolzano as a base, not a stopover
The old town of Bolzano is compact and walkable, the food sits at the intersection of Italian and Austrian cuisine
Most visitors to South Tyrol pass through Bolzano on the way to somewhere else, which means they miss out on experiencing one of the most pleasant cities in northern Italy to actually spend time in. The old town is compact and walkable, the food sits at the intersection of Italian and Austrian cuisine in ways that produce some genuinely excellent eating, and the surrounding valley gives way to mountain terrain within 20 minutes in any direction.
From Bolzano, the Dolomites are immediately accessible, which matters because the Dolomites form the part of northern Italy that most rewards time rather than transit. The landscape is vast enough that two or three days on foot barely scratches the surface, and the network of trails connecting rifugi across the high terrain is one of the finest walking infrastructures in Europe. Many visitors who come through on a driving holiday end up returning specifically to walk, often booking Dolomites hiking tours that allow them to cover the terrain properly over the course of a week, and with a guide who knows the area in depth.
“The Dolomites are the part of northern Italy that stops you in your tracks. Everything else is beautiful. This is something else entirely,” says a spokesperson from Hut To Hut Hiking Dolomites.
The Friuli-Venezia Giulia Detour
Friuli-Venezia Giulia is one of the most overlooked regions in Italy
East of Venice, Friuli-Venezia Giulia is one of the most overlooked regions in Italy. It borders Slovenia and Austria, and the cultural mix that produces gives it a character unlike anywhere else in the country; the food draws on Austro-Hungarian, Slavic, and Italian traditions simultaneously, the wine is some of the best produced in the northeast, and the landscape shifts from Adriatic coastline to alpine foothills within an hour’s drive. Trieste, the region’s main city, is an extraordinary place – a grand, slightly melancholy port city that was once one of the great cosmopolitan centres of central Europe, and still carries that history in its architecture and its atmosphere.
Almost nobody goes there on a standard Italian itinerary, which is precisely why it is worth going. The restaurants are full of locals, the hotels are priced for a domestic market, and the sensation of being somewhere that the tourist trail has not yet fully reached is genuine, rather than manufactured.
Slow down in Piedmont
Chisone valley along the road to Sestriere, Turin, Piedmont, Italy
The final stretch of a two-week northern Italy trip is best spent in Piedmont, where the pace drops naturally to something closer to how the region is meant to be experienced. The Langhe hills south of Turin are wine country of the highest order – Barolo, Barbaresco, and Nebbiolo d’Alba produced from vineyards that look exactly as wine country is supposed to look – and the towns of Alba and Bra move at a pace that makes hurrying feel not just unnecessary, but actively rude.
Bra is the birthplace of the Slow Food movement, which began here in the 1980s as a response to exactly the kind of travel that most people bring to Italy – fast, surface-level, and organised around ticking things off rather than actually tasting them. Spending the last few days of a trip here, eating well and moving slowly, is as good a way as any to understand what northern Italy is actually for.