The Etna DOC was created in 1968, making it one of Sicily's oldest wine appellations. For most of its history it was a source of undistinguished bulk wine — high-alcohol red produced from the Nerello Mascalese and sold north to augment the Burgundy négociant blends that required colour and body.

The Pontine Islands were not, from the Roman perspective, marginal geography. They were Imperial property, located on the principal maritime route between Rome's port at Ostia and the Campanian coast, and used as places of controlled exile for members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty whose continued existence was politically inconvenient but whose execution would have been symbolically difficult.

The Amalfi Coast is the most discussed stretch of coastline in Italy and among the most discussed in the world. This discussion has been going on, in recognisable form, since the mid-nineteenth century, when the British and German Romantic travellers who invented the concept of the Grand Tour's southern extension decided that the road between Positano and Ravello constituted a category of visual experience that required specific terminology to convey.

Sagrantino di Montefalco DOCG is made from a single grape variety — the Sagrantino — grown exclusively in a small zone of approximately 700 hectares around the hilltop town of Montefalco in the Valle Umbra, between Spoleto and Perugia.

The Val d'Orcia is the most photographed agricultural landscape in Italy and possibly in Europe. The photographs — the cypress alleys rising from bare clay slopes, the isolated farmhouse on a ridge against a grey and ochre sky, the road through green wheat fields in early May — have circulated so widely that the landscape has become slightly hostage to its own documentation.

The word masseria appears everywhere in Puglia's contemporary tourism vocabulary — on hotel booking platforms, in travel magazine features, in the menus of restaurants that have adopted the aesthetic without the underlying structure. This proliferation has made the word imprecise. Understanding what a masseria actually is — and why the distinction matters for anyone visiting Puglia — requires a short archaeology of the institution itself.

Sardinia before the season is a different proposition entirely, and April and May are the months that demonstrate what it is before the season turns it into something else.

Why January and February are the right months to visit Matera — the Sassi in winter light, the city at its most architecturally honest, and the private access that makes it complete.

January is the correct month to be in the Valnerina. The black truffle, known here simply as il nero, reaches its aromatic peak between December and March, and the hills around Norcia produce some of the finest specimens in Italy.