To visit Italy is to feel a sense of individuality, of regional pride and of place. Like Spain, Italy’s turbulent past means that Italians tend to feel more loyal to their region than to their country.

From their Mediterranean love of long lunches and siestas to their national obsession with fashion and the passeggiata (evening stroll), Italy’s people love life and are rarely indifferent to anything. Like the Spanish, their fiestas – celebrating everything from the local harvest to the saints of the Catholic church – are legendary, and it is a wonderful surprise to roll up in an arbitrary Italian village to spend the night only to discover that there will be no sleep due to a huge fiesta involving everyone from youngest to oldest to pets and livestock!

Always popular with Italian holidaymakers, Italys sun-bathed deep south is only now being discovered by the rest of us. With mile after mile of coastline, Calabria has a glut of sandy beaches, rocky coves and spectacular headlands. As befits a country with a variety of landscapes and environments, for every sun-bleached southern beach there is a mountainous inland, and the Italians love to ski as much as they love to sunbathe. From the Dolomites and Mont Blanc in the north to Abruzzo in the south, there is always a good ski resort within easy reach wherever you are in the country.