traveladdict

Castello di Sammezzano, Leccio, Italy The mesmerising ceiling, vaults and decor of the Peacock Room in this abandoned Italian palazzo near Florence speak for themselves. Peacocks, and other exotica, were the source of the inspired decoration to be found throughout the seemingly endless empty rooms of this daydream building. The Moorish-style makeover of what was a much older palace was the life work of Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona. Although the aristocratic Italian architect, engineer, botanist, philosopher and politician never visited the Levant or the Orient, he imagined a world of exquisite and highly exotic forms and colours that he brought to life in Leccio between 1843 and 1889. A hotel in the 20th Century, the palazzo and its polychromatic Peacock Room are in limbo today. Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire Completed in 1334 by the royal carpenter William Hurley, the exquisite timber lantern over the central octagonal tower of Ely Cathedral is one of the greate...

Many people in the West have never even heard of the pangolin, yet this “scaly anteater” is the source of a billion-dollar criminal industry that threatens to push it to extinction. BBC Future met a team of Hong Kong’s ecologists and activists trying to save these creatures from extinction. For millions of years, the pangolin’s natural reserve had been its best defence. The only mammal with hard, plate-like scales, it looks something like a badger in chainmail – and at the merest hint of danger, the pangolin simply roles up into a tight ball that is nearly impossible for a predator to penetrate. The shell is so tough that it can  even resist the teeth of lions , tigers and leopards . Not that many scientists have even been able to witness this behaviour themselves. There are eight species of pangolin across Asia and Africa, and they are all nocturnal, and notoriously shy, hiding in burrows and hollow trees for most of the day. Even conservationists working extensively in their...

I’d been drawn to this small Auvergne town (population 11,600) by its long history of craftsmanship. Knives were being made here at least as far back as the 15th Century, and probably as early as the 13th, according to the ancient grindstones found just below town by the Durolle River, which powered the mill paddlewheels. And knives have been made here ever since. In fact, the man showing me the knife in his shop, his fingertips cracked and blackened, had made many of them himself. Dominique Chambriard, wearing a traditional blue workman’s tunic, proudly led me to a version of the area’s iconic knife, ‘Le Thiers’, which was designed in 1993, when the Confrerie du Couteau Le Thiers (Brotherhood of the Thiers Knife) was set up to make a knife distinctive to their town. Fifteen local master knife-makers (including Chambriard), over a period of months, designed a simple, subtle, organic design for ‘Le Thiers’, based on ideas from their 16th-Century guild forefathers. “We had two p...

Mount Kinabalu is one of the richest biodiversity hotspots in the world. With the  4,095m-high altitude brings more cold than you might expect in the heart of the tropics.  It is packed with life in varied forms, including some animals and plants that don’t live in the wild anywhere else such as several species of carnivorous pitcher plant. These plants use a variety of techniques ‒ such as nectar, smells and colours ‒ to lure insects, and their traps deploy sheer drops, smooth surfaces that cannot be scaled or blockades of bristles to prevent their prey from escaping. Seemingly unfazed by the sticky humidity, market vendors in the city of Kota Kinabalu, from where most journeys up and down Mount Kinabalu start, sell a variety of local foods to hikers returning from the summit. Amid the sizzle and clatter of food stalls and the enticing aromas of buttered prawns and barbecued fish, pouches of sticky rice in dull, mottled wrappers aren’t the type of snack that catches at...