Discoveries And Key Travel Moments Of 2024

A trip to Rome in January saw me saw me sitting outside for coffee on suntrap corners of Trastevere. It’s not the only reason why I think that heading to this city is a perfect way to start a new year. Museums and churches are bestilled and calm but everything at this time of year – from temperatures to a sense of welcome – is warmer than more northern capitals such as Paris or London. Hotel rates are the lowest you’ll find all year and there are some superb new hotels to indulge in. Palazzo Talia wasn’t open in time for my visit last year but since August, this 17th-century building – with decor from Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me By Your Name – is an excellent reason to return.

A new (to me) wine region is also a delightful way to see the buds unfurl on a new year. Just outside Milan, over the last 40 years, Franciacorta has evolved to become Italy’s answer to champagne. Made to the same exacting standards as its French sibling, there are now over 100 wineries – and to house discerning Milanese – an increasing number of hotels. I fell heavily for L’Annunciata Wine Retreat – a former monastery high on a hill in Rovato – when I looked around it but L’Albereta is the stand-out hotel of this area, where the food matches the passion used to create the wine (the owners also founded the Bellavista winery here and a walk takes you through the grounds to its cellars).

In the U.S.A., I managed to experience a delightful trio of what the aviation industry calls ‘tertiary’ cities; smaller cities that aren’t airport hubs. Over the course of 2024, this European was equally enchanted by Savannah, St Louis and Minneapolis-St Paul. While all distinctly cut to their own cookie recipe, they shared common ground in urban essentials of good bookshops, superb art galleries (with St Louis Art Museum being the stand-out) and intriguing new hotels.

Over the last decade, people have whispered about the Greek island of Tinos, but early in the summer, I got to see what all the fuss is about. Reached via Mykonos by either helicopter or speedboat, it’s nine nautical miles and about six spiritual decades away from its neighbour. Both in its uncluttered landscape, small harbour towns and tavernas in small mountain villages, Tinos is about simplicity. Now there is a hotel to match its perfect Cycladean island vibe. Odera opened in the summer of 2024 and greeted its first guests with a thoroughly Greek reduction of bounteous hospitality, in proper hues of white and blue, wrapped around in 77 rooms and suites, beach, restaurants and a particularly thoughtful spa.

In Europe, come summer, when Italian cities are at their most over-touristed. Bari feels like the exception. Yes, it gets plenty of cruise passengers during the day when ships are in port but they are more likely to wander at will than be shepherded by earpiece and return to their ships by evening. Bari combines history with regional culinary expertise you’d want from southern Italy at prices that allow you to fully relax (I had a superb pizza for five euros at di Cosimo). In the old town, the Basilica of St Nicolo is both a Catholic church and – on a lower level – an Orthodox church – surrounded by a perfect piazza, ringed round by wine bars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. While the hotel chains are circling above the city, Vis Urban Suites, housed in a Liberty mansion (the Italian Art Nouveau) has panache from both its embrace of Italian design and committed local owners.

On my home turf, I made pleasing incursions to the countryside. Sussex is on an artistic trajectory that means that in the space of a day, you can go from the 18th-century Gainsboroughs at Petworth to West Dean’s surrealist masterpieces and the Bloomsbury set’s mothership at Charleston and its new gallery in nearby Lewes amid a vineyard-dotted landscape.

I visited Denmark twice, once to stay at Copenhagen’s charmingly thoughtful and community-minded Kanalhuset, where locals and guests gather each night for a communal meal. Other bonding activities that the hotel puts on include a weekly swim in the harbour. In April, I passed but in September, when I returned with my brother and cousin, one of my most cherished memories of 2024 is the afternoon when we swerved the museums. Instead, on the back of a last blast of summer sun, we – and what felt like half of Copenhagen – sunbathed and swam in the harbour near the city’s Opera House.