Trend on travel

Avoid the tourist scrum this summer

Nick Trend

It isn’t only Dubrovnik which is suffering from too many tourists (see Hugh Morris’s article, left). In recent weeks, the woman in charge of managing tourism in Venice has described July and August in the city as like a war zone and in Barcelona an open-top bus was sabotaged by locals sick of the number of visitors. There have been calls for help from residents in the Isle of Skye, and claims that Oxford has become a “tourist hell”.

No one wins from this sort of overcrowding, and ultimately it will seriously damage the most beautiful and historic places.

The best solutions will depend on the destination concerned, though some sort of limit on numbers seems inevitable in places like Venice, Rome and Florence. One consistent problem however, is the herd-like instinct of tourists obsessed with seeing the most famous sights. I do question the point of standing in a scrum of people trying to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, for example.

There is an obvious solution for a better experience, especially if you wish to visit indoor museums – travel in winter. But I also have an alternative strategy. If you are travelling in peak season, forget about the most famous sights. Every great city has some excellent alternatives which will be far less crowded and, because they are usually smaller, are often much more manageable to visit and easier to enjoy. Here are a few examples.

Paris The queues outside the Musée d’Orsay – the former railway station with more impressionist paintings than any other museum in the world – can be ridiculous. But last week I walked straight into the Musée de l’Orangerie (museeorangerie.fr) on the opposite side of the river. Upstairs are the greatest of Monet’s water lily paintings and downstairs is an excellent collection of impressionist and early modernist paintings.

Venice Not only do you have to queue just to get into St Mark’s Basilica, so crowded is it inside that you can’t appreciate the extraordinary 12thcentury marble floor and wall mosaics. Instead take the ferry to the island of Torcello, where there is an equally great cathedral with glittering mosaics but a trickle of tourists.

Pompeii The crowding in Pompeii in high summer is terrible. Instead, go to the extraordinary Villa di Poppea (pompeiisites. org), one stop up the railway line. Here, two dozen rooms of a sumptuous imperial villa have been exposed, including some of the best preserved and most beautiful Roman wall paintings anywhere.

Rome The queue for the Vatican Museum is such that barriers have been permanently installed along the pavement leading up to it. But across town, you can always walk straight into the Barberini Palace (barberinicorsini. org) where the galleries are empty of people and home to some of the greatest paintings by Raphael and Caravaggio, and Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII, among many others.

London The National Gallery can be ridiculously busy. Try the Wallace Collection (wallacecollection.org), which has old masters – from Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, to Canaletto and Gainsborough. It’s nearly always quiet and also free

Nick Trend is Telegraph Travel’s consumer expert