The single most useful thing I can tell you before your first trip to Italy is that it isn’t one country. It was twenty-odd separate states until the 1860s, and in every way that matters to you as a traveller it still behaves like twenty regions that happen to share a passport. The food changes every ninety minutes of driving, and so do the architecture, the dialect, the pace and the light, which is half the joy of it.

That’s why “we want to see Italy” is the brief I most often have to gently unpick. You can’t see Italy. You can see a piece of it beautifully, and come back for the next one, and honestly, that’s the better holiday.

So this is the piece I’d have you read before you decide anything: how the country divides, what each part is actually for, when to go, and the questions I’m asked most before someone commits.