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THINGS TO SEE IN EUROPE THAT AREN’T BORING OR EXPENSIVE

WORDS BY JAMES KNIGHT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE HADDOCK

At some point in your three years of minimal activity and maximum sloth you will want to explore the wider world. This will be an urge stronger in those who didn’t spend a year dicking about in Guatemala after their A-levels. For all those who want to recreate the Grand Tour or pretend they are George Orwell, here are a few of the less obvious attractions that the wonderful countries of Europeland have to offer.


ITALY

Forte Prenestino, Rome
Travelling all the way to the home of Roman civilisation to visit a squat may seem odd, but you have to take into account that this is the biggest squat in Europe, and is therefore of interest, especially if you like squats. The Germans think they have the whole squatting thing on lock with their organic beer made from grass and their violin-toting punks who do interpretive ballet set to Wagner, but Forte Prenestino is the real deal. The Italians call squats centro sociali, which sounds far more romantic than plain old squat, but the same thing that goes on in abandoned warehouses in Peckham goes on here on a grander and generally more productive scale. It’s basically a 19th century fort full of people putting on fantastic parties, concerts and exhibitions, and it makes London’s anarcho-crusty sit-ins look half-arsed.

The Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone Riviera
Imagine if, in the early 20th century, the state gave almost unlimited funds to a daredevil fascist poet, allowing him to expand his lakeside villa at will, merely to keep him from interfering with the government. Well, that’s exactly what the Italian government did. The fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio's monumental folly on Lake Garda, northern Italy, was built to insane proportions, and successfully kept the busybody wordsmith out of the way. His work is widely credited with inspiring Mussolini and Italian fascism, and there happens to be a battleship in his garden.

The ancient abandoned city of Ragusa Ibla, Sicily
Ragusa Ibla is a perfectly preserved gothic baroque-style town in the hills above the modern city of Ragusa, Sicily. It’s huge, amazing and practically empty aside from the few old people who never moved to the new town. So if you have a thing for creepy, haunted towns and lonely old women, this place will be a kind of paradise.


AUSTRIA

Narrenturm, Vienna
Not a million miles from London’s Huntarian Museum, the Narrenturm diplays unusual biological samples and a cornucopia of repellent human anomalies. It’s much less well known than the Huntarian though, so you’ll be able to enjoy its unnerving exhibits without a family with three five-year-olds crying next to you. In the 19th century, Vienna’s mentally ill were housed in the same building, so it will make for a sure-fire jolly stop on your tour of merry Austria.

Fucking, Tarsdorf
Fucking is a village in Upper Austria. There is absolutely nothing at all of interest about the town apart from the fact that it has a naughty name. Fucking actually nearly changed its name in 2004 in an effort to stem the flow of public funds that were being used to replace stolen municipal signage. There are now CCTV cameras dotted around the town’s welcome sign to deter people from nabbing it as a memento, so don’t bother trying to steal it unless you are so broke that you could do with a nice rest or a night’s kip in an Austrian jail. If you do manage to pinch it you’ll have a real gem to set off that wall of traffic cones with which you spent all last year decorating your front room.


FRANCE

The Mascaret Bore, Bordeaux
Have you ever wanted to see a Frenchman waist-deep in sewage? At the confluence of the Atlantic ocean and the Dordogne river you can find just that. Here, along the Gironde estuary, when the conditions are right, surfers line up to catch a wave of effluence, an occasional phenomenon that occurs when the ocean waves are so strong they rush up the river and carry with them all the crap built up over the previous year. Charming, non?

Le Palais Idéal de Ferdinand Cheval, Hauterives
Ferdinand Cheval, a postman from the Drôme region of southeastern France, spent 33 years around the turn of the century creating an “ideal palace”, built from stones he gathered on his daily 32km postal round. Poorly educated and with no knowledge of architecture, he shaped his surreal palace from daydreams all on his own. Though his local contemporaries thought he was a raving lunatic, surrealists and modern artists consider his palace to be a high point of “naïve architecture”, and let’s face it, it’s a lot more interesting than the Eiffel Tower.

Demeure du Chaos, Lyon
As you are students you won’t have had to try to get planning permission for anything yet, but rest assured it’s a fucking nightmare. Seriously, you can’t paint your door red in most of London without giving Boris a handjob. That’s why Thierry Erhmann, a French internet millionaire, is such a swell guy. The “artwork” that his home, which he calls the Abode of Chaos, has become is based around the transformation of a pretty 17th century building into a replica war zone, which features an imitation oil platform on the roof and a burned-out helicopter in the garden. Thierry has been battling lawsuits for a while now, so it’s well worth a look before they bring the bulldozers in. The city of Lyon is a beautiful place to visit, incidentally.

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