Summer travel is mostly about choosing your noise tolerance. Cap d'Antibes in August is one experience; Cap d'Antibes in late September is another, and they cost about the same to fly to. We have learned to plan our summers around shoulder weeks and the parts of the calendar nobody else has yet noticed, which is a useful way to live in a Europe that increasingly resembles a single very crowded restaurant.
Hydra, late June. The week before the season properly starts. The donkeys still outnumber the visitors. You can rent a small house above the port for what a midrange hotel costs in Mykonos, and you can read on a balcony until the sun goes behind the island at eight. The good restaurants are not on Instagram, the swim is at six in the morning, and nobody will ask you what you do for a living. Hydra in late June is the version of Greece we still tell other people about as if it were a secret.
The Engadin, July. Switzerland in summer is the answer nobody talks about. Pontresina, Sils, Sankt Moritz before the August crowds — the walking is biblical, the air is the kind of air you only get above fifteen hundred metres, and the hotels remember how to host. Three days here and you will sleep for ten hours a night. Bring a jacket; the evenings can be cold even in July, which is part of the point.
Puglia, late July. Specifically the Itria valley — Cisternino, Locorotondo, Ostuni — rather than the coast, which is fine but somebody else's holiday. Stay in a masseria, eat orecchiette for lunch every day, and accept that you are not going to leave the property between one and six in the afternoon. That is not a flaw. The whole region runs on a midday pause that nobody apologises for, and after the third day you find yourself defending it to friends who call from cooler places.
Sicily, September. As I wrote in the hotels column: the only month for it. The light turns honest, the sea is still summer-warm, and the better properties begin to empty. If you are not playing golf, drive the south coast for three days and stay at small places — Modica, Noto, Scicli. Eat at the trattoria the hotel sends you to, not the one with the queue. The queue is for somebody else.
The Cotswolds, August. Yes, really. The crowds are in London. The Cotswolds in August is empty, lush, and full of pubs that will feed you the best plate of lamb you'll have this year. Stay at a country-house hotel for three nights and walk fifteen miles a day. You will return to the city able to read books again, which is more than most holidays can claim.
The Norwegian coast, anytime. Lofoten in particular. We send one of the editors there every summer because it is the only place in Europe where, in August, you can walk for eight hours and meet seven people, total. The light from June through August does not really set. The water is cold. The fish is the best fish.
None of this is news. The trick to summer is just deciding what you are running from and choosing the place that gives you the most of its opposite. We will see most of you in September, somewhere quieter.
