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.

GERMANY

Obersalzberg, Bavaria

The Obersalzberg is one of the oldest tourist spots in Germany. It’s got loads of really pretty mountains, trees, lakes and things that make you glad you aren’t in a city. So much so that the area was Hitler’s favourite place to hang out in when he had some free time. Yup, it is in fact the setting for his infamous holiday home, the Eagle’s Nest. The Bavarian authorities are doing their best to bury the region’s National Socialist past, but you can still see remnants of Nazi buildings and fortifications, some of which have become museums or hotels.

Spreepark, Berlin

The Spreepark, also known as Cultural Park Plänterwald, is a really creepy, Coney Island-style abandoned theme park with overtones of Chernobyl, only without the hobo armies of Coney Island or any of Chernobyl’s lethal radiation. The park was the only permanent funfair in Berlin at the time of the unification, but went into insolvency in 2002 after the park’s owner and his entourage did a runner to Peru with six of the key attractions. Fairground ride smuggling is new to us too but as an interesting side note, the park’s owner was later caught attempting to smuggle 180kg of cocaine from Peru to Germany in the masts of the park’s flying carpet ride.

Fraunhofer Schoppenstube, Munich

If you’ve been travelling wearily around Germany and need a good feed, our German office assures us that this place is perfect. Small and informal, it’s a great place to get insanely drunk and eat the best

fleischpflanzerl

(meatballs) in Deutschland. Go trough.

SWEDEN

Truckstop Alaska, Gothenburg

This is the seediest bar in Sweden, if not the world. It’s run by a bunch of anarcho-feminists and we are not totally sure it’s legal. Last time we went there two different people fell over and landed on our table, and the band on stage chanted “Våldtäkt, våldtäkt, våldtäkt!” That means “Rape, rape, rape!” in Swedish. Nice.

Studio Andromeda, Saltsjö-Boo

The girls in our Stockholm office are friends with the guy who runs the studio which we featured in our recent Technology Issue. They inform us that a request for a guided tour of the studio to +46(0)855660099 will result in a fascinating trip, as long as you’re happy to either pay the guy some money, or buy some of his records.

The Apple Capital of Sweden, Kivik

Maybe this will sound a bit wet and whimsical compared to Czech sanatoriums and Italian fascists, but this is the region where Sweden’s apples are grown. There are little B&Bs everywhere, the hills are covered in wonky-looking apple trees, and kids line up along the roads selling fresh apples and “must” (a kind of cider). If you want a taste of quaint, old-time Sweden, and fancy a change from boring Stockholm, then visit Kivik, but make sure it’s apple season (around September) or it will be a total waste of time.

CZECH REPUBLIC

Sedlec Ossuary, Sedlec

Sedlec is a suburb of Kutná Hora, a city in the middle of the country, and is like a Czech version of the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome – its a small chapel decorated with human bones. It’s not an interior design choice you see a lot, but it looks great. The bones of tens of thousands people are buried in the grounds of the chapel, and a lot of them are arranged in delightfully macabre ways: pyramids of skulls, chains of hip bones, butterflies made from shoulder blades, fruit baskets made of knuckles and, well, you get the idea.

Sanatorium Bohnice, Prague

While you can traipse around an ex-sanatorium in Austria, Prague offers the real thing, with live inmates and all. You are literally free to walk around the mad house. It is probably a bit like walking around Bedlam in its heyday, though I suspect they’ve stopped putting cages on people’s heads and making them have sex for the visitors. There's even a pub where patients cook and serve beer. Fun, but probably slightly weird.

NETHERLANDS

Studio 80, Amsterdam

Studio 80 is an amazing club situated on Rembrandt Square, which is the worst, most touristy bit of the whole of Amsterdam. Tucked between the awful Escape club and an Irish pub that doubles as an all-you-can-eat spare ribs joint you’ll find Studio 80. It’s the club with the nondescript entrance and it is home to some of the best parties the city has to offer. It’s a bit like a Fabergé egg wedged between two steaming turds.

Tilburg

Nearly everyone who travels to the Netherlands ends up getting an Easyjet flight to Amsterdam, smoking too much weed, passing out, throwing up in a canal and then slobbering through a window at some haggard hookers thrusting their labia at you like opiated ostriches. Incredible though it may seem, there is more to the low country than Amsterdam. Tilburg is Holland’s hidden gem – a city with gothic cathedrals, close to lovely countryside. As well as being the growing-up place of some painter guy who cut his own ear off, it boasts the biggest fun fair in Europe, which goes on for two whole weeks in the summer. It is also home to the Roadburn festival, which is great if you’re into Kerry King guitar solos.