Itineraries

Turin built one of Italy’s first skyscrapers, raced cars on a factory roof and ran its whole modern revolution between vermouth and espresso. This is a day through the city’s lean, fast architecture of the 1920s and ’30s — café stops included.

Between the wars, Milan rebuilt itself in marble, concrete and glass — a hard new architecture caught between the avant-garde and a dictatorship that wanted monuments. This is a day spent reading that tense, brilliant, uncomfortable decade on foot.

Art Nouveau did not begin in Paris or Vienna. It began here in 1893, on two quiet Brussels streets, in the iron and glass of a young engineer-architect named Victor Horta. This is two days spent walking the city that invented it — twenty stops and about twenty kilometres, from the first Art Nouveau house to the last.

Vienna around 1900 was not a style but an argument — about ornament, freedom and how a modern city should look. This one-day walk follows that argument on foot, from Klimt’s gold to Otto Wagner’s steel, with coffee-house stops where the whole rebellion was once planned.