Recipefiesta

As a teenager I wondered what I would have in common with this Nordic island. Then my teacher gave me a book of poetry

Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.

Sauðárkrókur, a fishing town in the northern fjord of Skagafjörður, was all mountain, sea and valley. There were no trees to slow the Arctic winds, and I had already been blown sideways into a snowbank while walking home from Fjölbrautaskóli Norðurlands vestra, my new high school whose name I could not yet pronounce. At night, my dreams were filled with a soundscape of weeping women. When I woke, their wailing continued in the gusts outside. That was when I wrote. I wrote to understand myself in this new place. I wrote to understand Iceland, its brutality and its beauty.

A transformative conservation project encompassing East Anglia’s large but secluded Fritton Lake has high-end hospitality and nature-rich experiences at its heart

The scene is entirely black, white, grey and silver. It is cold, unusually dark and a film of ice is forming on the lake. I’m sitting in an unlit wooden sauna, alone, in immense silence. The only noise is the soft ticking of the stove as the heat rises. Across the water are ghostly silver birches and dark pines. Above them, Orion’s Belt shines bright. This vivid experience feels like midwinter in Canada, Finland or anywhere else about 60 degrees north. So it’s bizarre to know I’m a few miles south-west of Great Yarmouth.

Fritton Lake is an anomaly. Like the Broads to the north, this deceptively big, sinuous lake was largely created by medieval peat-digging, but it’s nothing like its Norfolk cousins. Set in a sandy, hilly landscape of heaths and pines, the northernmost outpost of the wildlife-rich strip of sandy heathlands running up the Suffolk coast, the lake is deep and two miles long but so hidden by trees that many people don’t know of its existence.

Like many Alpine areas faced with declining snowfall, Villach had to make a difficult choice: bring in the snow cannons or reinvent itself

Walking up a winding trail in the Dobratsch nature park in Carinthia, surrounded by picturesque snowy slopes dotted with pines, we hear shrieks coming from round the corner. The path is as wide as a one-way street but Birgit Pichorner, the park ranger I’m taking a tour with, motions for me to move to the side, where we watch a couple with wide grins glide past on a wooden toboggan.

We have seen families out hiking with young children and speed walkers pacing for the summit, while on a trail above us, four skiers are zigzagging up one of the nature park’s designated ski touring routes. For residents of Villach, the southern Austrian town at the foot of Dobratsch, this is very much their Hausberg, a much-loved “locals’ mountain”, says Birgit.

The small city in the Lorraine region has been put on the map with the aid of two Parisian heavyweights – a loan from the Pompidou Centre and designer Philippe Starck’s quirky new hotel

As I stand and look at a six-metre skeleton of a domestic cat named Felix, the words of Alice in Wonderland spring to mind: “Curiouser and curiouser.” The sculpture is part of a thought-provoking and enchanting exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and this isn’t the first time I’ve felt a sense of wonder during my weekend in this lesser-known city in north-eastern France. While most of us know what to expect from a city break in, say, Paris, Lyon or Bordeaux, Metz throws up surprises at every turn.

The giant feline sculpture is the work of Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan (of banana-duct-taped-to-a-wall fame), whose works form part of Dimanche Sans Fin (Endless Sunday), an exhibition he has curated that brings together more than 400 works from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which closed for a five-year renovation last October. Each piece depicts a different way the “day of rest” could be interpreted, whether it’s the innocent play of Picasso’s sculpture Little Girl Jumping Rope (1950-1954) or Max Ernst’s figure playing chess in the King Playing with the Queen (1944).

Art is helping to revitalise Sicily’s ghost towns and deserted urban spaces, with the earthquake-hit town of Gibellina becoming Italy’s first Capital of Contemporary Art

From the ostentatious baroque square of Quattro Canti all the way up to the Teatro Massimo, Palermo’s Via Maqueda is thick with tourists. Pomegranate juice sellers are setting up pyramids of fruit on their carts at gaps in the crowd and waiters are trying to reel in passersby with happy hour prices for Aperol spritzes. Amid the noise and movement, it’s easy to walk straight past number 206, whose arched doorway features a stone cross stained black with dirt – a clue to the building’s former use.

Convento dei Crociferi was abandoned for 30 years, until Sicilian power couple Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saievi took over and transformed it into Palermo’s newest arts space, the Museum of World Cities, due to open at the end of February. Inside, a cloister with high, scalloped porticoes frames a verdant courtyard filled with palms and banana trees. Bartoli comes to meet me and enthusiastically pumps my hand before leading me up to the grand, marble-floored rooms on the first floor, which have been given over to a rather self-referential exhibition on urban change.

There’s a lot more to LS Lowry than his matchstick men. A visit to the artist’s hometown reveals how his legacy helped turn a derelict dockland into the thriving creative hub of Salford Quays

My nan had one in her downstairs loo. An LS Lowry print, that is. It showed a street scene: 100-odd people, a few dogs, some mills in the background. I remember liking the work mostly because I could see myself in it, in a way that I couldn’t when faced with paintings of fruit or water lilies. I’ve had a soft spot for the painter ever since, and to mark the 50th anniversary of his passing, I travelled up to Manchester for a Lowry-themed break.

My first stop was the Manchester Art Gallery on Mosley Street, where a number of his works hang alongside those of his mentor, the French impressionist Pierre Adolphe Valette (Lowry took evening classes with Valette while working as a rent collector).

From ancient Greek bronzes to an unusual take on Donald Trump, readers recommend galleries and collections they’ve discovered on their travels
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We visited the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, in Mougins, a small village on a hill near Cannes. Full of exclusively female artists – from Berthe Morisot in the 19th century and Frida Kahlo in the early 20th to contemporary figures such as Tracey Emin – it houses an incredible collection of often overlooked art and artists. We visited on a rainy October day and it was remarkably quiet and calm. I particularly enjoyed the abstract works – well worth a trip up the hill.
James