The shoulder months — those weeks either side of high season — are quietly where most of the best European travel happens. We have written before about the pleasure of January, and of late November. Here is our working map of the rest of the shoulder year.
February and early March
Rome, in these weeks, is a different city from the summer one. Light sharp off the travertine, the tourists in the Forum numerable rather than uncountable, the old trattorie keeping their winter menus. Pair it with a week further north — Florence, or better, one of the hill towns in southern Tuscany, where the February almonds are coming into bloom.
Late April and early May
Paris as soon as the lime trees begin. Madrid and Seville in the same fortnight, when Andalucia is warm but the heat has not yet settled. The eastern Mediterranean — the Peloponnese, the Turquoise Coast of Turkey — in what is for us the most beautiful month of their year.
Late September and October
The Italian lakes returning to themselves, the Provençal countryside in its slow late-year brown, the Portuguese coast before the winter swells. London, too, in the early autumn, when the city remembers how to be its most generous self.
Early December
Vienna, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm — the northern capitals in the first weeks of the month, while the markets are up but before the holiday week itself. A handful of days in each, a quiet hotel, and the kind of dinner that requires a coat from the door to the car.
The common property of these weeks is a certain calm. The places do not need to perform, because they are not, in those months, being looked at. This is when they are most themselves — and when, we have always believed, a luxury traveller sees them best.
