Voices, methodology, news.
Long-form pieces and short field notes from the people building the platform. New writing roughly every two weeks.
Doors to Italy: the third one climbs over the Karst.
Villa Opicina is the second Trieste door: two regional trains a day from Ljubljana, a tram that came back after nine years, and a trunk that runs down the Adriatic to the sheep roads of Abruzzo.
By Robert Ranzi
Doors to Italy: the second one is the Brenner.
Door number two serves the largest audience in the program and the most complicated crossing: the Italia in Tour pass does not work until south of Bolzano. The honest way from Munich to Umbria, in seven days.
By Robert Ranzi
Europe doesn't have too many tourists. It has too few destinations.
Every summer the same headlines return: Venice overrun, Barcelona in revolt, the Greek islands buckling under cruise ships. The instinct is to conclude that Europe is full. It isn't.
By Robert Ranzi
Europe still has language islands. A field guide to the seven the platform now covers.
A continent everyone thinks they know still holds at least a dozen working minority-language enclaves. Seven now have destination pages: Miranda do Douro, four Alpine German communities, the displaced Lemko of the Polish Beskid Niski, and the Aromanian edge at Trikala.
By Robert Ranzi
The German language islands of the Alps
In the Italian Alps, ten or twelve communities still speak languages their ancestors brought south from Bavaria, the Tyrol and Valais in the Middle Ages. They are not dialects of standard German. They are older than standard German, and most of them will be gone within a generation.
By Robert Ranzi
The EU's first Sustainable Tourism Strategy: what it actually means for travellers
Commissioner Tzitzikostas's long-promised strategy is nearly here, and the European Parliament's transport committee has already told the Commission exactly what it wants inside. Here is what is real, what is still coming, and why it matters if you are planning a trip to Europe.
By Robert Ranzi
The mayors of disappearing villages: portraits from three countries
In Basilicata, the Auvergne and the Albanian Alps, the people in charge of places almost no one visits.
By Robert Ranzi
Doors to Italy: the first one is in Carinthia.
A twelve-month editorial program built around the seven railway crossings into Italy. The first door opens at Tarvisio Boscoverde and the trunk runs all the way to Ravenna.
By Robert Ranzi
A 59 euro case for the other Italy.
Trenitalia just put five days of regional rail on sale for 59 euro. No high-speed, no Lombardy, no Cinque Terre, no Bolzano. The exclusions are the editorial filter.
By Robert Ranzi