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  "path": "/2026/05/16/taking-mum-italy-helped-us-grieve-laugh-28323068/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-16T06:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://metro.co.uk",
  "tags": [
    "Lifestyle",
    "Travel",
    "Death",
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    "Family",
    "grief",
    "Italy",
    "Travel Inspiration",
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    "Palazzo di Varignana",
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  "textContent": "Metro’s travel editor takes her mother on holiday once a year for a reason (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nThere was a time when I thought my mother would never laugh again.\n\nIt would be an understatement to say that after my father’s death ended their enviably contented 43-year marriage, she lost her sparkle.\n\nOur family GP suggested that a change of scenery could help with the grief. My mother, a sweet but steely Irishwoman in her 70s, did not agree.\n\nBut eventually, whether we want it to or not, time becomes a healer.\n\nIt has been almost four years since my father died.\n\nAnd for the past three of those, I have managed to convince my mother to come on holiday with me: just once a year, just for a few days, and just, if we’re honest with ourselves, to shut me up.\n\n##  Best of Metro Deals\n\nGet exclusive discounts with Metro Deals – save on getaways and spa days. Powered by Wowcher\n\n**Bannatyne Spa** : Spa day for two with treatments, lunch & prosecco — save up to 57% off.\n\n Get deal now\n\n**Mystery Escape** : Hotel stay with return flights from as low as £92pp — save on worldwide holiday packages.\n\nGet deal now\n\n**Beach Retreat (Lanzarote)** : 4* Lanzarote beach holiday with flights — save up to 58%.\n\nGet deal now\n\nIt can be upsetting, but Dr Anna Batho, an NHS clinical psychologist, tells me there are many benefits to travelling with a parent after their partner has passed away.\n\nOur travel editor’s parents in Ireland, four years before her father died (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\n‘Travel can help them step out of their role as ‘widowed’ and back into the identity they knew before,’ she says.\n\n‘Perhaps they were a real foodie who loved discovering cuisines, perhaps they were the organised one who took on big-trip planning.\n\n‘That person is still there and they can reconnect with that.’\n\nTravel can be a healthy distraction from the day-to-day slog of grief, adds Dr Jeff Gardere, clinical psychologist at Touro University.\n\n‘When a person is grieving, they can become quite isolated and their interests in the outside world become much narrower. Travel interrupts that cycle. It activates different parts of the brain to absorb and express positive emotions,’ he says.\n\nTravel is also, in its way, a tribute.\n\n‘You both get to honour the person who has died by enjoying the life that sadly, they cannot,’ Dr Batho explains.\n\nAlice and her parents in 1998; psychologists say travelling can help us process grief (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nMy mother doesn’t ‘do’ social media, and I have reason to believe that revealing her name to an audience of strangers could result in immediate disinheritance.\n\nSo from here on out, we’ll just call her Mam.\n\nThis year, on the back of a newfound fitness addiction that compels her to attend aqua aerobics and a variety of gym classes almost every day, I had new criteria to meet.\n\nWe needed a short-haul destination that offered good food, rest and relaxation, but also _activities_.\n\n‘Mam’ getting her bearings in Bologna (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nI researched much as one might for a holiday with a dog. Because on top of her exercise classes, Mam routinely walks 20,000 steps a day.\n\nThere had to be trails, paths, and plenty of them.\n\nDuring said research, I received an invitation to review Palazzo di Varignana, a resort in the Bolognese hills of northern Italy.\n\nI saw that The Telegraph had included it as one of the best holidays for your health in 2025, so I checked it out.\n\nNot only does it have a sprawling spa complete with a hammam, Finnish sauna, and something called a face gym, there is a driving range; tennis and padel courts; e-bikes; several swimming pools and a saltwater crystal pool to boot.\n\nThere is a vineyard, a Roman Amphitheatre and an exquisitely restored 1921 royal train carriage where you can gorge on a seven-course feast.\n\nAs far as the eye can see, the whole caboodle is enveloped by landscaped gardens, elegant terraces and verdant countryside crisscrossed with – you guessed it – plenty of paths.\n\nMam, I knew, would be in her element. I’d just have to keep up.\n\nCycling the hills of Emilia Romagna (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nPalazzo di Varignana is about 30 minutes by car from Bologna in the heart of Emilia Romagna, Italy’s ‘food valley’.\n\nThe scenery is spectacular: rolling hills dotted with medieval castles and undulating plains of fertile land.\n\nAs we cruise up the driveway, both Mam and I are impressed.\n\nThere are 150 bedrooms, including a recently renovated two-bedroom suite perfect for families, plus six larger villas close by that would be great for a hen.\n\nInteriors are slick and unfussy; the aforementioned gardens, glorious.\n\nThe vineyards and countryside surrounding Palazzo di Varignana (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nAll of it sprawls around an 18th-century villa on an immaculately manicured 30-acre estate.\n\nIt is, genuinely, just a beautiful place to be.\n\nAnd if it sounds aspirational, it’s probably less so than you imagine. Rooms start from £250 a night, breakfast and spa access included.\n\nWhen I think of what I’ve spent on a grubby bed at Luton Airport…\n\nMam hits the ground running. We cycle. We swim. We even try a golf lesson, during which she tells instructor Luca that he’s not the first person to say she has no wrist action.\n\nI’m not sure she knows how that could be interpreted. Some things are better left unsaid.\n\nMam getting a golf lesson from incredibly patient Luca (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nWe walk. We swim. We stuff ourselves to bursting at the resort’s five restaurants.\n\nOur fine dining experience in Treno Reale, the one inside the vintage train carriage, is the star of the show.\n\nMam texts our family WhatsApp to say the dessert, a decadent slab gianduja, praline and raspberry sorbet, is now part of her death row meal.\n\nWe taste wine. We have aperitivi in the evenings.\n\nBut more than any of that, we talk about my dad and how much he would have enjoyed it all.\n\nA death row meal on Treno Reale (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\n## A lunch to remember\n\nMany come to Palazzo di Varignana for high-end health retreats curated by Dr Annamaria Acquaviva, a multihyphenate dietician-nutritionist-pharmacist who is also an expert in mindfulness.\n\nWe have lunch with the good Doctor at Gingko, a ‘longevity restaurant’ whose menu she designed to ‘help guests live longer’.\n\nWith pride, she tells us that everything we’re eating is anti-inflammatory, low-FODMAP, gluten-free, dairy-free and free of refined carbohydrates, inspired by the Mediterranean diet, balanced in macronutrients and enriched with antioxidant phytochemicals.\n\nAt one point, a waiter arrives with plush black blindfolds which Dr Annamaria insists we all wear to ‘eat mindfully and consider what we are putting in our bodies’.\n\nShe advises us to chew each bite ‘around 30 times’.\n\nMam, I can tell, is not convinced.\n\n‘Longevity’ lunch: turnip and grilled octopus (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nOf course she is unfailingly polite and to the outside gaze, totally engaged.\n\nBut this is my mother, a no-nonsense Irishwoman raised on potatoes, butter and whatever could be found at the back of the cupboard.\n\nI know what she’s thinking: ‘What a load of *****’.\n\nAfter a lengthy education about sleep, superfoods and brain chemistry, I ask Dr Annamaria to tell us the most important thing we should do if we want to live to 100.\n\n‘Laugh,’ she says.\n\nI wasn’t expecting that.\n\nA laugh a day and all that (Picture: Alice Murphy)\n\nA few days after we get home, Mam and I are sitting on the sofa.\n\nOut of nowhere, she bursts into uproarious laughter, her face red and eyes brimming with tears of delight.\n\n‘What?’ I ask, amused.\n\n‘Remember the lunch with the blindfolds,’ she says, and the two of us are cackling, lost to the ridiculousness of the memory.\n\nWhich leads us on to several other ridiculous memories, most of them involving my dad.\n\nTurns out Dr Annamaria is right: laughter really is the best medicine.\n\n##  Getting there\n\nRyanair flies from London to Bologna. Prices start from £26 in June.\n\nFrom Marconi Airport, rent a car or take a taxi to Palazzo di Varignana. The journey takes around 30 minutes.\n\n_Alice Murphy was a guest of Palazzo di Varignana, but don’t expect us to sugarcoat anything — our reviews are 100% independent._\n\n_Rooms at Palazzo di Varignana start from €289 (approx £250) per night based on two people sharing. This includes breakfast and three hours access to the spa._\n\n_For best rates, book through the website._\n\nComment now Comments \nAdd Metro as a Preferred Source on Google\nAdd as preferred source\n",
  "title": "Taking my mum to Italy helped us both grieve, and laugh, again"
}