Turin. Torino. I went with a goal in mind — I wanted to see the temple there, at the Museo Egizio. Lately my friend and I had been doing hotel crawls, but this wasn’t a hotel crawl. We stayed at one hotel, not a perfect one, but a perfectly adequate one. Good room, Egyptian-style spa. Confused Americans at check-in. A pretty good oat milk cappuccino on the first day, not so good the second (in Sardinia they didn’t even understand what I meant by oat milk, so we’re doing well here). I was here to see one of the transported temples outside Egypt, and the hotel certainly fit the theme.

Learn about Genoa before you visit. On the way to a new place, they say that anticipation can be just as good as the trip itself. After my first visit to Egypt in 2019, I developed a pretty involved method to savour that pre-trip excitement. Like most people I love to scour TripAdvisor, ask friends for tips, and save cool-looking cafes on Google Maps.