Andreina Cordani tries seafood out of a loch and avoids the hordes.

cc. Flickr.com / mike138

About two hours’ drive away from Glasgow, is the virtually uninhabited valley of Glencoe, where mountains soar into the sky as spring water pours down their sides. Deer roam the pastures, and you can even see the occasional eagle. For a quick weekend escape, there’s nothing better, and if you want to stay longer, there’s plenty more to discover. Travel in spring or Autumn and you’re taking a risk with the weather, but you’ll be avoiding the tourist hordes – and let’s face it, when it come to Scotland, you’re always taking a risk with the weather.

This is our must-list for the Glencoe area…

Walk the Hidden Valley
In previous centuries the Hidden Valley was used as a hideout for sheep rustlers or quarrelling clansmen, but now it’s one of the most popular walks in the area. Walk, clamber and occasionally bum-slide along the two-mile path through a beautiful forest, crossing a sparkling burn which looks clear enough to drink (although don’t!) until the valley finally opens out in front of you. Leave mid-morning and you’ll get there in time for lunch in the valley, before heading back.

Visit the Clachaig Inn
Want to drink whisky, listen to live music, chat up outdoorsy Scottish men and carouse until the early hours? The Clachaig is for you. It’s the best place to party for miles around and if you’ve been to the Hidden Valley that morning you’ll see all the people you met along the way in the bar that night. The Clachaig also offers simple but very welcome accommodation including deliciously hot showers. The food is simple and hearty, perfect after a hard day’s walking and there’s even a drying room for your soaking-wet walking gear. (clachaig.com)

Sandwiches at Crafts and Things
OK, when it comes to freshly-made lunches you’re not exactly spoilt for choice. It’s Crafts & Things or… well, Crafts & Things. Luckily their rolls and cakes are excellent, they make packed lunches to go or you can eat in, surrounded by books and various crafty-crystally type gifts.

Seafood feasts
If there’s one problem with Glencoe it’s that there aren’t enough good places to eat. Local eateries vary from the tartan-tablecloth-mixed-grill variety to the beautifully decorated places which garnish everything with ‘jus’ and charge a fortune. One exception is the Lochleven Seafood Cafe, which serves deliciously fresh, simple fish dishes straight from the loch.

Land Rover safari
The National Trust at Glencoe runs ‘safaris’ around its land from April to October. Incredibly enthusiastic guides drive you around, teach you to spot wild deer on the mountainside and give you a real insight into the landscape around you.

Get paddling
See nearby Loch Linnhe from different point of view by booking a kayaking session (we went with Rockhopper) Paddling silently along the flat water, we saw a seal pop its head out of the water and follow us. A perfect moment – and it’s great for the biceps, too. www.rockhopperscotland.co.uk

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/72486075@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Donna Wheeler is fascinated by one of Milan’s most seductive villas, the sisters who once lived there, and their vintage closets…

Biblioteca, Villa Necchi Campiglio

No one really comes to Milan for the Roman ruins, early Christian churches or even its stunning, other worldly Duomo. Milan is for shopping, catching Daniel Barenboim at La Scala, doing deals at the Salone Mobile or Moda Donna fairs. Or for kicking back with a Negroni at one of its many bars while gawping at the obscenely wealthy and preternaturally beautiful.

I came to Milan to research a book and found its streets forbiddingly grey, its air heavy with pollution and its pace as tyrannical as New York’s or Beijing’s. Milan’s attractions are, of course, far more seductive if you’ve got a healthy expense account. I certainly didn’t, but one has the sense that even the most cashed up of casual visitors are kept at arm’s length, doomed to always be in a parallel world of public spaces, while much of gilded Milanese life is conducted within apartments, rooftops and courtyards. I got the odd glimpse via invitations to dinner or art openings, but I more often caught just the heady perfume of lush courtyard gardens as imposing wooden doors clanked shut. The city’s position as Italy’s economic hub and indefatigable modern metropolis conspire with its dense webs of family fortune and dynastic ambition to make it near impenetrable. Hubris, history and frazzled exhaustion don’t exactly make for la dolce vita .

Since the spring of 2008, a small piece of its haute-bourgeois splendour is no longer entirely private. Nestled beneath rows of grand residential apartments, between the fashion heartland of the Golden Quad and the design showrooms of San Babila, is a rare architectural masterpiece, and for once there’s no eagle-eyed concierge to stop one peeking. Yes, you’re a paying guest, but it’s no less thrilling to wander in the gate, past herb-filled garden beds, and to spin around and breathe the scent of what was so recently a secret garden.

Eccentric Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi designed Villa Necchi Campiglio in 1932 for Nedda and Gigina Necchi, the daughters of a Pavian industrialist, and Gigina’s husband, doctor-turned-entrepreneur Angelo Campiglio. Heirless, Gigina Campiglio Necchi donated the house to the Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano, or FAI, Italy’s National Trust, upon her death in 2001. The FAI’s meticulous restoration took several years and quite a few million euro, reversing many of the ‘improvements’ which were made to the house in the 1950s. It’s the FAI’s first Milanese property and, appropriately for the city, also its first major 20th-century one.

Set in sprawling grounds with a Hollywood-style heated swimming pool, tennis court and cloistered by elegant towering magnolia trees, the house is unequaled as a symbol of the city’s 20th-century industrial wealth and Modernist imaginings. Rooms are lavishly decorated and finishes are breathtaking – Chinoiserie banisters line the staircase and airy light-filled bathrooms are clad in the best local marble. Unusual, ambitious details such as the terrarium-lined sun room, electronic shuttering and brass-clad central heating surprise; big ticket 20th-century Italian art works by Morandi, Di Chirico and Campigli (on loan from the collection of Claudia Gian Ferrari) mix with quotidian details. Closets are stuffed with bias-cut silk slips, cloche hats and fur collars, monogrammed brushes line dressing tables and luggage still sits at the ready for one of the wanderlusting sisters’ many journeys. The kitchens are decked out with shiny appliances, cupboards stacked with freshly pressed linen and staff uniforms.

While it’s very easy on the eye, Portaluppi’s Art Deco and Italian Rationalist co-mingling also evokes an uneasy sense of historical cusp; the house speaks of an outlook that was vertiginously forward looking while at the same time desperately anchored in a world fast slipping away. Interestingly, the sister’s subsequent renovations sought to tamp down its visionary design and make it a ‘normal’ bourgeois home.

The basement – originally servicing the pool and housing the staff – now contains large blown up photographs of the seemingly inseparable sisters. They lounge poolside, beam from the deck of an ocean liner or strike elegant poses in far-flung locales. The touching intimacy of the house and these photographs (along with the lack of any meaningful documentation – in English at least – of the sisters’ lives) is rich fodder for an active imagination. How did husband Angelo fit into the picture? What did the sisters chat about in their chic bathing costumes as the century’s darkest clouds gathered on the horizon (could they really have been as tone-deaf to the cataclysm as they appear in these photographs)? Who was it that these Hilton sisters of their day were entertaining as the 1930s came to a close? Where were they when the Allied bombs began to fall? Who, exactly, were these women? In a city such as Milan, one where you are forever on the outside looking in, questions such as these don’t have easy, or one suspects, particularly palatable answers. The splendid, haunting Villa Necchi Campiglio is all the more intriguing for it.

Via Mozart 12
02 760 02 877
€6 (by guided tour only)
Opening hours:10-18h Wed-Sun (last entry 17:30); garden café until 21h
Nearest metro: MM1 (red line) San Babila

In summer, New York City is dirty, sweaty and stinking hot. In fact, I have the fan on right now. But escape is possible, imminent even. Only a two-hour drive north of the city on the I-87 near the town of Gardiner is Lake Minnewaska, tucked in the Shawangunk Ridge. To enter the Minnewaska State Park Reserve forest there is $7 fee per car. Near the car park there’s a grassy lea with picnic tables.

Take the chance to eat lunch here as food is not allowed at the shore. This place is pristine. There are no garbage bins either so you have to take your rubbish with you. From the picnic area, it’s a short walk to the rocky edge of Lake Minnewaska.

Look out for wild blueberry bushes that are in season from mid-summer. On the shoreline there are cedar-paneled change stalls to switch to your swimmers. Sitting on high stools like tennis umpires are two New York state lifeguards tut-tutting teens jumping from the jetty into the water. Who can blame the kids?

The water is so refreshing, so beautiful. Gotham feels a world away.