Like the most beautiful girl in school, Italy knows full well that everyone is in love with her. We can’t disguise how besotted and bewitched we are by her natural, national style: we can’t help staring when men in Armani suits pootle about on Vespas, perfectly elegant couples perform their evening passeggiata, and even the nuns drive like Michael Schumacher. We can’t stop ourselves eaves-dropping where everyday speech is a song. The whole gorgeous Italian shtick — the laundry flapping over the streets, the obsession with style, design and bella figura, the glittering camp and piffle on the telly — just makes life seem more fun, and we simply can’t resist.

Well, don’t resist. Go to Italy right now if you can: Venice in January is misty and freezing, but almost unbearably evocative and romantic. Go in February, when the almonds blossom around Sicily’s ancient Greek temples. Go at Easter, to watch the Florentines “explode the cart” in fireworks — they’ve been doing so since the 11th century. Go in summer, when music festivals fill the squares, and when Siena and Asti and a hundred other medieval cities compete to win a palio, or a jousting or archery tournament, while the townspeople swan about in costumes and pageantry, just like the Medici. The rivalries are still astonishingly fierce.

Go to Italy now because it’s easier and cheaper than ever. The boom in low-cost flights to small airports such as Brescia, Trieste and Pescara has made so much more of the big boot accessible; and the number is set to double in 2005, with the rumoured conversion of military airports for civilian use at Capua, Udine, Vicenza, Aosta, L’Aquila (Abruzzo), Comiso (Sicily) and Oristano (Sardinia). Although Volare, the Italian budget airline, sank in November 2004, keep your eyes peeled for new fledglings. AirSal, for instance, is due to start direct low-cost flights from London and Dublin to Salerno, adjacent to the fabulous Amalfi coast.

Once you’re in Italy, while life certainly isn’t cheap, your holiday pound buys a lot more than sun and sea. You get a geographical grand opera: cliffs plunging into lakes, smouldering volcanoes, soft hills rolling into the twilight as far as the eye can see. You get art and history like nowhere else in the world: the chance to see a Giorgione or Caravaggio still hanging in the church that commissioned it, the chance to get lost in Perugia on lanes laid out by the Etruscans. The Italians have preserved not only the family jewels (two or three works of art per capita, it’s said), but, to a remarkable extent, their settings, too.

You also get to share a seductive, artful way of living. The Italians may still bodge their politics, but with 2,500 years of civilisation under their collective belt, they know how to distil maximum pleasure and beauty from everyday things. The Slow Food movement, invented in Italy, is not only about preserving gastronomic traditions. It also enshrines la dolce vita conviviality that’s essential to enjoying them.

What follows is a personal guide to the country — for families, and adults only. Finally, one word of advice: when considering Italy, especially in summer, pay close attention to the dates, as prices tend to increase dramatically in July and August.

Unless stated, all package prices are based on two sharing and include flights from London (call the operator for regional or Irish departure options).