Most of us have heard of the Spanish Treasure Fleet, which sailed every year from Havana to Seville with the annual silver production of...

Having seen the Carta Pisana as young student in the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris in 1981, I planned to write a blog about cartography...

In one of my blogs the previous year, I talked about Turkish Gulets, the slow, commercial freighters for bulky goods, which became the...

If we were setting sail two thousand years ago, would we meet a Roman cruising party like us on the AFAED? Did the Romans travel for...

We are all looking forward to the delicious seafood we are going to have during our sailing holiday. Buying if directly from the...

Did you ever wonder why the galleys, the Queens of the Mediterranean, suddenly disappeared in the 18th century? More than a hundred years...

Would we need a weather report for our trip from Genoa to Tunis given that neither the Genovese nor the Pisan merchants had any such...

On our trip from Genoa to Tunis, the coast line changes constantly. The green Apennine Mountains accompany us first, the rougher peaks of...

Yesterday, we wondered about the marbles of the Tower of Pisa and where they were from. Today, we are going to talk about what the tower...

Less than thirty minutes after lifting anchor in La Spezia and putting the boat on a course South, the Apennine Mountains come back into...

One of the advantages of sailing off the beaten track is getting off the beaten track. With a few exceptions, the places we visit did not...

Two days into this summer’s sailing, we round the last cliff of Cinque Terre. To our left the small town of Porto Venere comes into view,...

1087 was a decisive year in the Mediterranean. Pirates were suddenly gone, the sea lanes to Egypt open again, Palestine was reachable...

The English make movies titled 4 Weddings and a Funeral. The Italians name wines for Fresh Water (Dolceacqua) and Five Counties (Cinque...

Ever wondered why there is no big port between Genoa and Napoli when sailing down the west coast of Italy? There was one in Ostia at the...

Three years ago, my friend Ryan, with whom I closely worked on Wallstreet for almost ten years, told me that his ancestors were from...

Ever wondered how people of Genoa felt when Rome fell in 476 AD? Their Empire for 700 years gone, roads decaying, long-distance trade...

One of the things we plan for Saturday, 11 July, before setting sail, is touring Genoa and exploring the town that inspired our trip for...

When we sail along the coast of Corsica in July, we will not only see chestnut but plenty of mulberry trees. You may remember that the...

Most people who holiday in Corsica associate the island with beauty, sun, sea, rocks and maybe some rosé. But hardly anybody associates...