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Italy

  
One of the world's foremost tourist destinations as such, for various reasons. Mostly for mainstream tourism and cultural tourism.
  
But there are plenty of things that are of special interest to the dark tourist too, even though some of these also overlap with mainstream tourism – which is particularly true for Pompeii and the Colosseum in Rome.
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
- Pompeii 
  
    
  
- Catacombe dei Cappuccini, Palermo, Sicily  
 
  
Italy thus boasts a great number of dark attractions across a wide array of categories, from cemeteries and catacombs to disaster sites, from medical museums to WWII and fascism-associated sites, some of them top-notch examples of their respective categories. And that’s far from the end of it. I know there are plenty more dark places to discover, especially with regard to WWII (I’m thinking of, e.g., Monte Cassino) and also yet more magnificent cemeteries (Pisa is said to have an especially monumental one) as well as more venerable medical museums (it seems like the one in Turin would be worth seeing). So there’s yet more great potential.
 
So far I’ve been to Italy seven times, mostly on relatively short trips lasting between two and ten days, which have taken me to Naples, Rome, Milan and Bologna, Trieste, the north around Longarone (see Vajont Dam) and the Dolomites and twice to Venice (first when I was a teenager, so before overtourism started stifling the place, and again in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when there were travel restrictions and no cruise ships and hence overtourism was suspended). And my next planned trip will be to Sicily (watch this space).
 
Italy is a great country to travel in. And indeed it’s one of the most touristy countries in the world, and accordingly with an excellently developed infrastructure to handle this. That’s mostly mainstream tourism, of course, mainly either of the beach-and-sun sort (yawn!) or cultural tourism, which Italy can cater for like few other countries on Earth. But as you can see from the list above, dark tourism also gets quite a significant share.
 
Getting into Italy is easy – from farther away flying in is a main option, with Rome and Milan being the principal hubs for long-haul flights, but Naples, Palermo and Catania and other cities also have international connections.
 
Travelling in overland from the north is also a good option. There are good train connections from the neighbouring countries Austria, Switzerland and France.
 
By road is another option and indeed self-drive holidays to Italy were once the standard form of tourism. I remember that from my childhood in the 1960s and 70s when that was the primary type of holidays for Germans (though my family never partook in this – my first encounter with Italy came later, by “Interrail”).
 
You can even get into Italy by ferry especially across the Adriatic (from Albania, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia) but also from Greece, Malta and Northern Africa (especially Tunisia).
 
Getting around Italy is aided by a very good rail network providing reliable (unless there’s a strike on) connections between larger cities (including some high-speed lines) and smaller towns too. For more remote places, buses can help, otherwise self-driving it is. Hire cars are readily available and the road network is generally good. Motorways (‘autostrada’) are typically toll roads. Car theft is an issue in Italy, though, so if your car has an electronic key it is advisable to keep this wrapped in tinfoil when not using the car to counter unauthorized reading/copying.
 
Given how touristy Italy is generally, accommodation options are endless across all budget categories.
 
Italy is rightly fabled for its food & drink. Many people think only of pizza and pasta (maybe also risotto and antipasti) but there’s so much more! P&P are typical more for the southern half of Italy, though by now omnipresent (global even), while the cuisines in the north can be quite different. Sicily is an altogether special category – one of the top gourmet Meccas of the world. Italy, in particularly Veneto, is also word-famous for its ice cream (gelato).
 
Primarily a wine country (indeed one of the top ones in the world) Italy was also a very early pioneer in the craft beer revolution, almost right from the start in the late 1980s, in fact; and by now it’s widespread across the country. Coffee is a big thing here too (especially in Trieste) – with typical Italian varieties such as cappuccino and espresso only the best known ones (internationally). Italians typically roast their coffee beans darker than others, so it’s stronger and more bitter (and hence often diluted). Tea is less typical but also readily available – as are all the usual soft drinks. The standard sugary branded ones can be avoided by going for local varieties made freshly from fruit. A legacy from ancient Roman times is the availability of drinking water from fountains that can be found across cities and even within tourist hotspots such as Pompeii. No need to buy bottled mineral water, then, except in more rural/remote parts where there are no public water fountains.
 
The weather of Italy, like almost everywhere, is affected by climate change. Summers in the south are becoming more and more often stiflingly hot. Some areas, including the north, increasingly suffer from drought. But there can also be heavy wintery spells in November to February.
 
The Italian language is a descendent of Latin and hence for speakers of English it is lexically not as obscure as other languages, though speaking it properly is no easier than with any language. These days tourists can get by quite well with English (though Italians speak it often with quite a strong distinctive accent); German is quite widespread too, due to the high proportion of tourists from Germany. Outside areas visited by tourists you may not find anybody speaking foreign languages.
 
Italy sits on the boundary of the Eurasian and the African tectonic plates and is hence quite earthquake-prone, with occasionally quite destructive events (e.g. Naples in 1980). It is also the only European country to feature currently active volcanoes, with Stromboli and Etna (Sicily) the most active, and the infamous Vesuvius the potentially most dangerous (Pompeii and Herculaneum are testimony to that). These volcanoes are in fact tourist attractions in themselves. Especially in Sicily, volcano tourism is quite big business. Most of the time, visitors are not in any danger, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a possibility that cannot be ruled out …