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Good day, and welcome to the first Rich Travel Edit, a monthly round-up of new stories from Rich Travel Magazine that arrives on the fourth Thursday of each month. This month: sixteen nights by car from Venice to the Val d'Orcia, the white wine made by inmates on Europe's last prison island, Argentina's $350,000 route to citizenship, and the $44 policy every foreign visitor to mainland Tanzania now has to buy.
This Month's Spotlight
This Month's DigestThe route runs sixteen nights from the top of the Adriatic to southern Tuscany: three nights in Venice, five on Lake Como, three in the Cinque Terre, four in Florence and one in the Val d'Orcia. Only two of the five stops need a car, so it goes into a garage at Piazzale Roma on the first afternoon and stays there for three days, while boats and trains do the moving on Como and the Cinque Terre. Flying into Venice and out of Florence means a one-way hire with no doubling back. October and November suit the route better than July. Venice has no access-fee dates after July, the Cinque Terre card drops to its post-season price on 2 November, and Florence's big autumn exhibitions are open. Things also start shutting: one of the Bellagio gardens closes for all of November, the Cinque Terre boats stop around the start of the month, and winter tyre rules apply on signed roads from 15 November. In Venice, the municipal garage at Piazzale Roma is quoted at around €35 for 24 hours, and a three-day ACTV card at €45 pays for itself before lunch on day two. An hour by boat from Livorno, Gorgona is the smallest island in the Tuscan archipelago and the only island penitentiary left in Europe, an open penal colony where about sixty-five men spend their days at work rather than in a cell. Since 2012 some of them have also made wine: five inmates near the end of their sentences work just over two hectares of vines above the Tyrrhenian Sea with agronomists and winemakers from Marchesi Frescobaldi, and earn a wage for it. The partnership began when the prison wrote to about 400 Tuscan producers looking for a commercial partner, and Frescobaldi was the only one to reply. Its white, a Vermentino and Ansonica blend called Gorgona, has just gone on sale in the United States with its fourteenth vintage, the 2025. The Guardian has reported that around 20 per cent of former Gorgona prisoners reoffend, against roughly 80 per cent of those released from mainland Italian prisons, a result the island owes to its whole regime of open-air work rather than to the vineyard alone. Argentina will start taking applications for citizenship by investment in the fourth quarter of 2026, Economy Minister Luis Caputo announced in Paris on 2 October. The price is a non-refundable $350,000 contribution to the National Treasury or the purchase of an $800,000 government bond, with no requirement to have lived in the country first. A spouse adds $100,000, as does each child aged 18 to 25 who is single with no children of their own, and each child under 18 adds $25,000, so a couple with two young children pays $500,000. That is twice the $250,000 cash contribution a family of four makes in Dominica or St Kitts and Nevis. The scheme rests on a decree President Javier Milei issued in May 2025, and in June 2026 two federal appeal courts ruled that the decree could not change who grants citizenship. Government sources told La Nación that the executive would probably take the question to the Supreme Court. Since 1 October, foreign visitors entering mainland Tanzania by air, land or sea have had to hold a $44 travel insurance policy issued through the country's National Insurance Corporation (NIC), and cover bought at home does not replace it. Under the regulations, a foreigner without one "shall be denied entry into Mainland Tanzania." Residents of East African Community and Southern African Development Community countries are exempt. The policy can be bought before departure or on arrival, covers medical emergencies for up to 92 days and allows multiple entries in that window, so a side trip across a border and back does not mean paying again. Zanzibar has run its own scheme since October 2024: visitors who arrive there buy from the Zanzibar Insurance Corporation, those who arrive on the mainland buy from NIC, and a trip that takes in both needs only one policy.
Also This Month
That is all for this month. See you on Thursday 26 November.
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