With its “sorbet-coloured” hillside towns, the Amalfi Coast is one of Italy’s most beautiful places – but its high prices and traffic-clogged roads can be a pain. If you visit in the high season, you might do better to stay in Salerno, says Jessica Furseth in The Guardian, the “relaxed” port city just to its east. Restaurants and hotels there are much cheaper, there are regular ferries to places such as the town of Amalfi, and the city has attractions of its own, including a lively seaside promenade and an old town with an impressive medieval cathedral. It also sits on a main coastal rail line from Naples, offering quick, easy access to Pompeii (back towards Naples) and to Paestum (further south), with its ancient Greek tomb frescoes and temples of “golden” stone (“inexpressibly grand”, according to Shelley).
An idyllic escape from Melbourne
Set in the “gentle” hills of the Macedon Ranges, a 90-minute drive north of Melbourne, the little Australian town of Daylesford is “a hotbed of farm-led fabulousness”, much like the village in the Cotswolds after which it was named in the mid-19th century, says Sarah Turner in The Sunday Times. Daylesford has a great Sunday market and some “posh” boutiques, but is best known for Lake House, a hotel and restaurant that has driven the town’s evolution from “hippyish” to (appealingly) “haute” in recent decades. Run by Alla WolfTasker – now one of Australia’s most “revered” chefs – and her husband Allan, it offers wonderful five-course tasting menus for £130, which is a “fine-dining bargain” by Cotswolds standards. Stay if you can in one of its 33 hotel rooms, or at the “very luxurious” six-suite lodge set on its own farm, where kookaburras and cockatoos flit about the mineral-water-fed swimming pool.
A charming Victorian seaside resort
“The sweet, sensible sister of brassy Scarborough”, the Yorkshire seaside resort of Filey is “almost absurdly nice”, says Helen Pickles in The Daily Telegraph. Home to just 7,000 people, the town is “elegant” and quite unspoiled, with just one amusement arcade, a small “child-friendly” funfair, and no “flashy attractions” – and the five-mile beach it sits on is “gorgeous”. Recent years have seen the opening of a small gin distillery and the launch of a spring literary festival, but most of Filey’s shops and cafés are long-established. For instance, Sterchi’s Chocolatiers opened in 1916. Wherever you stay (the White Lodge Hotel is “the place for treats and celebrations”), don’t miss the town’s pretty boating lake, the Sunday concerts at the bandstand, or the RSPB’s Bempton Cliffs reserve, which is home to spectacular seabirds.