Spectator Life

In the 1953 classic Roman Holiday, Gregory Peck takes Audrey Hepburn on a tour of the Italian capital on his Vespa. They scooter past the Colosseum, stop for gelato by the Spanish Steps, and sip champagne and iced coffee in front of the Pantheon. But Peck, that rake, sold Hepburn short. No Roman holiday is truly complete without checking out Ponza, a tiny island off the Lazio coast.  Ponza is to the Romans what the Hamptons are to New Yorkers: a safe haven in the muggy summer months. Plus, they can escape all those yokel English-speaking tourists who stalk the Eternal City. Ponza still feels like the Italy of La Dolce Vita. (Federico Fellini shot parts of Satyricon on its beaches.

Until recently, I viewed Málaga’s growing movement against ‘overtourism’ with scepticism and detachment. During the eleven years that I’ve lived in Andalucia, this gorgeous city has always been a tourist hub - which is good, because tourism drives Spain’s economy, accounting for 13 per cent of GDP and around the same proportion of jobs. The Costa del Sol, as Málaga’s coast is called, welcomed a record 15 million visitors in 2025, generating €22 billion (£18.8 billion) in revenue. Spain clearly needs its tourists, so should be careful about putting them off.

‘Quiet luxury’ is all the rage these days, the social media algorithms tell me. On Instagram and TikTok, Americans inform their followers that clothing with no visible branding is a true status signifier, before extolling the virtues of Barbour jackets and Loro Piana shoes. Aspirational people shouldn’t drive flashy new cars, they argue; instead, they should drive a 30-year-old Range Rover – as if the inevitable engine rebuild wouldn’t cost more than most people would spend on a car. When decorating, millennial grey is wrong, garish, and uninteresting; everything must be sage green with brass accents. There is nothing more quiet and luxurious than the B&Q colour-matching desk.

There are those Spectator readers who are fortunate enough to own their own luxurious villas in some suitably picturesque European locale. For the rather less well-heeled remainder of us, the closest that we are going to get to these places is either putting hand in pocket and hiring an Airbnb or, if we are extremely fortunate, being invited to stay with our affluent chums. On paper, at least, it’s a mutually beneficent arrangement. The villa-owners get to be entertained (and entertaining), offering their largesse in exchange for suitable gratitude. Their guests, meanwhile, get a free holiday somewhere wonderful, away from cares and responsibilities, and spending time with dear friends into the bargain. What could possibly go wrong?

Are you a ‘recliner’ or a ‘refrainer’? Do you ease your seat back on an aeroplane as soon as you can, or remain bolt upright and swallow your fury as the headrest in front is lowered a few inches from your nose? Or are you to be found in the slender oval on the Venn diagram; the waiting room between recliner and refrainer, hanging on until the food service has finished before caressing the recline button? Whose armrest is it? Nobody cares anymore. All anyone wants to know is will the person in front of them recline their seat?

I am in the 70th minute of my two-hour Balinese rubdown when that John Milton line swims into my head. You know: ‘Man can make a heaven of hell, and totes the opposite too’ (I may be misquoting slightly). More than three centuries on, the Paradise Lost epigram remains apt. I’m in a sun-drenched, five-star, tropical resort – and I’m miserable. It’s my own fault; I always forget how much I hate body massages. The hole in the table is too small for my muppet-sized head. It locks my jaw fiercely open, forcing the muppet to discreetly suck in his drool every half-minute. I’ve desperately needed to pee for the past half-hour, and the masseuse is prodding my taut bladder with the insistence of a Gestapo Oberleutnant whipping a prisoner for information.

It’s a sweet little town, Arcachon. Clinging to the long French Atlantic coast, adorned with Victorian villas and pretty flowerbeds, it reminds me oddly of Bournemouth. By which I mean: Bournemouth before it was ruined. As such, it’s the kind of place that usually calls for a return visit. I am sure for many French people it is a holiday regular – ‘ahh, shall we do Arcachon again? Mais oui, we can try that new oyster cabin.’ But right now I seriously wonder if anyone will want to return to Arcachon, ever.  The reasons are twofold.

Cincinnati. Wow, what a city! Who knew? Well, nobody, judging by a straw poll of dim and dozy friends, most of whom didn’t even know where it was. One was genuinely convinced that Cincinnati was in either Sardinia or Sicily but couldn’t confidently say which. Another vaguely recollected that trash TV host Jerry Springer had once been its mayor and that Cincinnati was most definitely in Ohio: ‘You know, down by Georgia, Alabama and, um, Nevada.’ A third had heard that Vice-President J.D. Vance lives in the city, and that abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe once had. All Simon knew was that it was home to consumer goods firm Procter & Gamble.

Christopher Nolan could not resist the spell of the White Dune. Tucked inside a lagoon, it rises out of the sand like a tower, glistening against the cloudless blue sky. The British filmmaker shot several scenes of his blockbuster The Odyssey (out today) at this otherworldly landmark, located near the city of Dakhla in the Western Sahara. Until now, much of the region – a former Spanish colony which has been under Moroccan control since the 1970s – has been largely untouched by tourists. Yet that is expected to change under King Mohammed VI, who is investing billions in metamorphosing the area into a hub for business and tourism. Think of it as tomorrow’s Dubai. The Gulf metropolis, after all, was a fishing village not that long ago.

When I first moved to Cuba, an ex-girlfriend said: 'That sounds lovely, Ruaridh. What next, Thailand?' The Caribbean island has always come with a certain reputation – the writer A.A. Gill noted that the Cubans are the 'most libidinously choreographed people in the world.' It wasn’t the revolution that made Cuba known for sex. The sleaze goes way back, probably to 1492 and beyond (naughty Tainos), but by the 1950s, Havana’s infamous Shanghai Theater was putting on live sex shows, performed by a gentleman called 'Superman' – and not because he could fly. Such libertine ways – and the mob that controlled them – were part of the reason Fidel Castro gave for tumbling the then dictatorship.

Of all the disturbing news out there at the moment, up there is some American company's possible takeover of easyJet. Last week we learned that the budget airline had agreed in principle to a £5.7 billion takeover offer from US asset management firm Apollo – days after accepting a bid from rival firm Castlelake. What? Good old sleazyJet exiting the London market? Just when it was becoming really, really good? Alright, I may be exaggerating slightly here – budget airlines never get really, really good (that is why they are called budget, dear). But there is budget and then there is budget. Who can forget when Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary floated the idea of standing seats on flights and a £1 ‘pay-per-pee’ fee to use the lavatory in 2010?

Is it possible, or even acceptable, to feel the same grief for the loss of a favourite place – or holiday location – than for a person? I’d say yes, because people divide pretty much equally into two camps when it comes to the summer hols. There are those who love trying out new and different places, and then there are bores like myself, and my wife, who like returning to the same place every year. Same beach. Same menus. Same ice creams. Same pale rosé. Same owners. Same crowd.    In my case, I’m talking about Paloma Beach in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera.

‘A man who has not been in Italy,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority.’ With a 12-year-old daughter living there, I myself have avoided this fate. Yet, for all the trips back and forth to see her, I know little of the country, beyond noticing that the romance of Cinema Paradiso or the clowning of Roberto Benigni are, though one side of it, also highly misleading. There is a melancholy here, and a seriousness too. Recently I’ve been delving into books on Italy, to try to pierce my way beneath the surface. Not that surfaces are trivial to the Italians – most writers agree they’re paramount.

Delhi was hot, noisy and chaotic. As always. I’ve never liked the place. I pour with sweat, get grumpy and scratchy, and just want to go home. What I do like, though, is Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. It’s everything that the surrounding city isn’t, being cool, quiet and calm. I can cope with Delhi if I can stay here, thank you very much, largely because of its wonderful Hardinge Bar, surely the finest in town. I mean, have you ever tried its Imperial Saffron Negroni? It’s an absolute belter. And the eponymous Hardinge, made from whisky and marmalade, is a corker too. Sadly, I wasn’t in the Imperial long enough to do too much damage to the cocktail list. I was here simply to regroup before heading north.

Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 metres, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. 'I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,' he tells me when I visit. 'It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.' It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

France versus Albion is always good sport. The latest instalment of the rivalry was settled conclusively with PSG’s recent victory over Arsenal. As for the wider comparisons, strewn with titanic clashes – the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Trafalgar, Liquorice Allsorts versus Carambar – I’m no expert but I did live in Paris for a couple of years and was intoxicated by it from the very first evening there, a January Saturday in foul weather with the normally placid Seine a broiling mess. But after moving back home I hadn’t returned until this year. Inevitably, the first thing you do upon rolling off the Dover to Calais ferry is start declaiming how much better the French do things than us.

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road.  Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

Train travel is so expensive these days, but £25,000? For that you get a couple of nights stay on board, with double bed, bathroom, sitting room, views down the track as it recedes into the distance and a rear balcony should you come over all Harry S. Truman.   This is the master bedroom on The Chairman’s Train, puffing into action in July as the UK’s first fully private heritage train for hire. And yes, for £45,000 - a day - you and your 15 guests can have the whole thing, its dining carriage and many comfy rooms pulled by the locomotive of your choice, electric, diesel or steam.

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognises it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier.  In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway ‘country’ (via a peace accord) policed by Russian ‘peacekeepers’.