Gorizia’s post-war watchtowers and cyclone fences remain but you can now, of course, meet the border on your own Eurozone terms: put your right foot in and shake it all about, or hop, amble or drive out of Italy without even a flash of a passport. (The Slovenian new town, Nova Gorica, on the other side is far from pretty, but its shops, bars and casinos pulse with life while the original Gorizia slumbers.) Cold War absurdity aside, this small, stately city has long been a mutable, and cannily self-assured, place, its winding inner streets awash with multi-tongued ghosts, their trade and negotiation, faith, art and war.

Palazzo Lantieri is not a hotel but a private home, the guests that came before you a ripe assortment of popes, poets and playwrights, warriors, radicals and Hapsburg royals. It’s as discreet as it is elegant, a former 14th-century fortress turned noble house unassuming behind high walls, and its owners Carolina Lantieri and Niccolò Piccolomini are jovial and generous hosts.

The bedrooms have astonishingly beautiful antiques, towering stufas and echoing parquetry floors, yet its infused with an easy, enveloping warmth. Outside is a wonderful garden, its bowers and paths modelled in the Persian style, leading to a darkly canopied apex. It’s calm and intriguingly labyrinthine, mannered but with the reassuring markers of everyday life: a wendy house, ponds with a tiny becalmed boat and the frolicking family beagle (who recently made his film debut in a Werner Herzog film we are told).

Today’s Lantieri faces are mirrored in several centuries of portraits that line the public reception rooms, but they are a family firmly of the times. Large site-specific installations by Jannis Kounellis, Jan Fabre and Michelangelo Pistoletto and works by Getulio Alviani, Giulio Paolini and Donatella Spaziani now form an integral part of the palazzo’s art collection. These contemporary works are inspired by, and continue to interact with, the objects and architecture of other eras. In the former cellars, Clementina Lantieri, Carolina’s sister, has a ceramics studio, holding classes as well as selling works known for their graceful form and jewel-like glazes.

The family can suggest places to eat in walking distance or the best dining rooms in the countryside – the local food is enthralling even if some dishes, like the dustily sweet or astringently herbal filled raviolis, and a preponderance of game, can be a jolt for those still expecting familiar Italian flavours. Dishes are often startlingly different even from the stalwartly Friulian cuisine of Udine, under an hour away, or the Venetian-influenced food of Grado, on the nearby coast. My memory, perhaps clouded by the superb (and, when here, cheap) Collio Goriziano or Colli Orientali whites, recalls first the colours of the food: all red and white and deep brown and green, seemingly the landscape writ large on the plate. Its tastes too are of the earth, rich and comforting, but also of empires and trade routes distant in time if not place. If you were to eat only one thing, though, it should be the gubana, a flaky, filled snail of a pastry. This nutty, fruity, boozy roll can be found elsewhere in eastern Friuli (and across the border too, the name coming from the Slovenian word ‘gubat’, which, loosely translated, means ‘how we roll’), but Gorizians like to claim their own as exemplar.

The city itself is not without things to see, including a magnificently-sited 13th-century castle, a blingy Baroque cathedral with Gothic chapel attached, an 18th-century synagogue and ghetto streets, their former gates garlanded with serpents and flowers, not to mention a harrowing WWI museum and various memorials to this bitterly contested front. And the afore mentioned minute-to-midnight era mementos. But there would be nothing at all wrong with making a journey here to simply go to sleep in such surrounds, and to wake to the deep green silence of the Lantieri garden.

All images © Donna Wheeler

Spring is without a doubt the best time to visit the Blue Mountains. The mild weather is ideal for bushwalking without working up a sweat and the surrounding towns are full of English country gardens.

The air is scented with daffodils, jonquils and freesias and the cottages that populate the streets once you turn off the highway are pretty as a postcard. I ought to be wearing a flouncy white dress as I skip through the gardens collecting spring blooms in a wicker basket.

But we have actually come here to go horse-riding so I’m wearing jeans and cowboy boots as I round up the kids and ensure they’re all slathered with sunscreen.

Our accommodation in Wentworth Falls is a gorgeous little cottage called The Dairy. A fragrant garden greets us and we’re sold on the place before we even walk through the front door.

The Dairy is nearly 100 years old and has been decorated beautifully. It’s so cosy it seems like somebody actually lives here. It’s spacious enough for our large brood – the retro dining table seats 10 – and it has a delightfully eclectic collection of books and DVDs (everything from Seutonius and Jane Austen to Holiday Goddess Jessica Adams).

Our horseriding experience is equally charming family affair. Kathy Tucker, who runs Werriberri Trail Rides with her daughter, has promised horses for riders of all levels of experience.

And she is true to her word – the horses are all very sweet tempered, clearly loved and well looked after. Kathy is able to tell us each horse’s history, and being a bit of a horse-tragic I’m a keen listener. 10-year-old Mary gets Billy, a 30-year-old quarter horse and former cutting competition champion, and I get to ride Bonnie, who regularly wins ribbons at gymkhana when she’s not busy in her day-job.

The group of horses that greets us is also delightfully varied in size. From the enormous Clydesdale offered to my partner to an Icelandic pony not much larger than a Shetland proffered to the youngest of our troupe.

The Megalong Valley is surely at its finest. Wattle blooms all around us and the views of the surrounding escarpments are magnificent.

Two hours pass a bit too quickly, but we all gain enough confidence to canter a few times, nobody falls off and everybody’s happy.

Back to our little country cottage for an enormous meal followed by an evening of stoking the hearth and flicking through the collection of books.

This is what a family weekend in the country is supposed to be like. Even the hairs on my head are relaxed.

More information: visitbluemountains.com.au

It may be just over an hour from New York’s Grand Central Station, but New Canaan, Connecticut is a different world. On a flawless October afternoon, it’s a full-immersion American fantasia: leafy hills coloured russet and gold, light as luscious as that of a pre-revolutionary Fragonard, the air scented with cinnamon and hubris. New Canaan boasts not only one of the most affluent communities in the US – don’t stand in the way of the terrifying women stocking up on tiny Pierrot-styled cashmere cardigans in Crewcuts – but also the east coast’s largest concentrations of mid-century architecture. (And only third to Los Angeles and Palm Springs.)

You could take a trip to this pretty slice of haute-suburbia just to soak up the Rick Moody mise-en-scène, and peek at the odd-master work from the road. But every summer and fall, hordes of architecture-tourists now come to see celebrated architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House at close hand. This tiny but extravagantly glazed jewel in the Connecticut modernist crown has, since the architect and partner David Whitney’s deaths, been under the protection of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public since 2007. The tours have proved so popular the organisation has had to continually extend their programs to meet demand.

While Johnson’s ultimate legacy in architectural circles is as an educator and populariser, his 1949 Glass House is iconic enough a work to make it into high school art and design textbooks the world over. It’s a house pared back to its essence, with minimal framing and a flat roof; it both underscores and subverts what we normally recognise as shelter, substituting glass for brink or wood or concrete. Mies ‘less is more’ van der Rohe’s extreme clarity, his much vaunted ‘skin and bones’, is here rendered literally – the house is transparent. Dividing walls are all but dispensed with, although traditional zones to eat, rest, cook, sleep and wash are still demarcated, almost stridently so, and the interior materials – wood, leather, tiles and brick – are seductively warm, surprisingly cottage-like. A central cylindrical unit houses a fireplace and the bathroom; its archetypal chimney shape firmly earths the surrounding lightness.

While the house’s aggressive minimalism has become shorthand for American modernism itself, it’s the site – an equally iconic east coast landscape of some 47 acres – that is its defining feature, and what makes visiting such an extraordinary experience. Johnson used a prized Poussin as a screen in the living area, and the painting is key to the whole shebang. This idealised Baroque landscape served as both inspiration for the ever growing, ever manipulated estate that surrounds the house, as well as being a formal, but characteristically pert, declaration of the architect’s intent.

The Glass House is, for all its many ascribed meanings, essentially a pavilion from which to simply be, to exist for a time in a perfected visual world. Johnson was enamoured with the constructed wildness of Paris’ Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and neo-classical English gardens of the 18th-century, and the view from the house combines these old world influences with rambling fields and meadows that recall those of his Ohio childhood.

As well as a swimming pool, a neo-Baroque lake pavilion, a ghostly house-shaped ‘folly’ and a large sculpture by Donald Judd, the grounds are dotted with several other structures. These include the original brick guesthouse, solidly facing off with the Glass House itself; a campy, mad (and maddening) Frank Stella collaboration, ‘Da Monsta’; and a cell-like po-mo library. Johnson and Whitney’s collection of paintings by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella and Julian Schnabel inhabit an underground art lair that was built in 1962; although Johnson claimed it was inspired by a Greek tomb, it feels like the quintessential cold war bunker. The works are kept on revolving ‘poster racks’, making for an oddly hermetic, if luxurious, way to experience a collection, a few paintings at a time. It could almost be one of the basement home entertainment zones of the surrounding McMansions, only for more rarefied tastes.

The sculpture gallery, with a booty that includes a Dan Flavin and a Bruce Nauman, has an almost opposite aesthetic; with its glass ceiling and tubular steel rafters, it’s light to the point of feeling like a garden shed, or, with its continual play of light across walls and floor, rather more like an actual garden glass house.

What of the architect himself? The tour is flush with sparkling anecdotes about infamous society soirees that took place at the house, Johnson’s propensity for snobbery and arch repartee, his prodigious work ethic and his often fractious relationship with his mentors Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. One thing about Johnson that isn’t mentioned in the tour, nor in any take-home literature, is the rather galling fact that, once upon a time, he wasn’t just your garden-variety design fascist. He was, in fact, a gung-ho Nazi sympathiser, involved in the far right’s cause deeply enough to be welcomed as a guest of the Third Reich (to witness the invasion of Poland no less).

Unlike like the German Mies, Studio BBPR in Milan or Finland’s Alvar Aalto, his politics were not conveniently contrived for commissions’ sake, or survival. Johnson only really tamped down his domestic propagandising when, in 1940, the FBI had a quiet word about possible consequences if the US was to enter the war, which, of course, it soon did. The expat Australian art critic Robert Hughes recalls interviewing Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, in 1978, and being asked by Speer to take a cheerfully inscribed copy of his recently published monograph back to Johnson in New York. On unwrapping the gift (naturally while lunching at the Four Seasons restaurant, Johnson’s Seagram Building collaboration with Mies), he paled and furiously stuffed the book under the banquette. ‘You haven’t shown this to anyone?’ Johnson murmured, according to an amused and ever provocative Hughes.

Looking at Johnson’s spectacular American idyll with the knowledge of his early (and later regretted) political obsessions isn’t vital, or even necessary, to appreciating or understanding it. But the motivations that drove modernism on both the left and the right throughout the 20th-century, not to mention architects’ often-Faustian pact with power, are, for me at least, worth pondering.

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.