Hotel Della Punta, Bordighera, and Hotel Le Petit, Turin, Italy

Piecing together off-the-beaten-train-track itineraries in Europe can make for very long travel days; we prefer to take some breaks. Here are the hotels we used for two overnight stops we made in June ’03 in ITALY.

• Hotel Della Punta (Via S. Ampelio, 27-18012 Bordighera [IM], Italy; phone +39 01842 62555, fax +39 01842 68925, e-mail info@hoteldellapunta.it) — in Bordighera, one of the small towns on Italy’s “Flower Riviera” just across the frontier from France.

We stayed during the shoulder season for €88 ($107) for a double with breakfast. We drank prosecco at a café where well-dressed elderly women cooled themselves with handheld fans; ate outdoors in the Old Town, and strolled the seaside passagietta with what seemed to be the entire populace. This was our second stopover in Bordighera, and it remains a favorite place.

• We chose Turin for an overnight stay because we could easily catch a TGV train to Paris from there.

Hotel Le Petit (Via San Francesco d’Assisi, 21, I-10121, Torino [Turin], Italy; phone +39 011 5612626 or fax +39 011 5622807) — centrally located but very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we never heard the parade passing by until we went out for dinner!

We followed the bands, the medieval royalty, a turn-of-the-century ambulance and more to a square housing a tall tower festooned with evergreen branches. After some speeches by civic luminaries, the paradegoers held their torches to the tower and it flamed and sparked magnificently.

We were struck by the small-town nature of the celebration in the middle of sophisticated Turin, and we will certainly keep an eye out for St. John’s Day celebrations if we are ever in Europe on June 24 again.

Our room cost €120 ($146) per night including buffet breakfast — a bargain in this city.

MARY RACK & DAVID FULK
Overland Park, KS