What the locals tell their friends

Tuscany holds up for a long stay with a mixed group in a way most regions do not. This is the argument for it, the case for Chianti over Val d'Orcia, and the three situations where it is the wrong call.

Vertical, hard to move around, and worth it if you plan for that rather than against it. Where to base yourself so the coast road does not eat the week, and why the ferry beats the car.

The riad faces inward by design, which is the architecture rather than a quirk. How to use the medina on foot, and why day-tripping the High Atlas wastes the best part of the trip.

The hill country you came to see was created by a fungus: coffee leaf rust arrived in 1869 and took the island's economy down within 20 years. Ten nights, two bases, and the train between them.

The Mani has 206 mapped places to eat and 17 websites between them. Not 8 per cent dead, which is what this series usually measures, but 8 per cent existing. A guide built for a peninsula that is almost entirely offline, and an argument about why the towers were never built against the Turks.

The temples are the irrigation system, and we know because in 1971 the government overrode them and the rice failed. Also: 952 venue websites checked and 41 per cent of them dead, the worst rate in the series and from the most developed place in it.

Two Portugals sold as one. They are 250km apart, they have almost nothing in common, and combining them casually turns into a drive that neither place repays.

An island with an unusually high rate of repeat visitors, which means the good addresses circulate by word of mouth and very little is arranged for a first-time visitor. How to get at them.

Everyone writes about Santorini and Mykonos. Naxos, Sifnos and Milos are where people who know the Cyclades actually go, and the ferry timetable shapes the whole trip.

The island has two entirely separate reputations and most guides only cover one. The north, the interior, and the case for when the loud end is genuinely the right answer.

The islands reward a boat and punish a car, which reverses how most people plan it. Vis was closed to outsiders until 1989 and still feels apart.

The Costa Smeralda is about 30km of one coast, not the island. Where to go for the same water without the postcode, and the nuraghi, which exist nowhere else on earth.

The Riviera has had 150 years to arrange itself around visitors, which is its strength and its problem. What the density buys you, and where to go inland when it stops being worth it.

Troodos, the Akamas and the eastern villages, written for someone who wants the island the diaspora goes back to rather than the one the package holidays sell.