Trieste in the morning, on foot. The fish market by the canal opens early and it’s exactly what a fish market in a Habsburg port city should look like. Marble slabs, ice, colour, noise, vendors who’ve been doing this for forty years. The city rewards anyone who looks at it properly. Then the road inland towards Križna.

Križna is one of the least-visited cave systems in Europe. Not because it’s hard to reach, but because most people don’t know it exists. At the entrance everyone gets rubber boots and a rechargeable torch. There is no electric lighting anywhere inside. You go in on foot through vast limestone halls, then by boat on the first underground lake. The boat carries lights beneath it that illuminate the water from below, turning it green and blue and throwing the cave ceiling back at you in reflections. Your torch picks out the formations above. The cave runs for over 8 kilometres. What the light does in here is the kind of thing photographers spend entire careers trying to recreate in a studio. Here it just exists. It takes about two hours and nothing above ground quite prepares you for it.

The Lipizzaner horse was bred here. Not in Vienna. Here, at the Lipica Stud Farm, which has been supplying the Spanish Riding School since 1580. There are around 300 horses on 300 hectares of Karst grassland, and they have the place to themselves.

You’ll have time to walk the farm, get close to the horses, feed them. They’re used to people and they’ll let you in. That matters when you’re trying to photograph an animal rather than just document one.

Then the real work. We set up an outdoor studio: one horse, open sky, October light. The brief is simple. Grace, movement, stillness. The Lipizzaner in black and white is one of those subjects that doesn’t need much help. The muscle, the coat, the way it holds itself. You’re not trying to make a nice picture of a horse. You’re trying to make something that looks like it belongs on a wall. This is the place to do it. There is nowhere better.

Back in Piran by late afternoon. The rooftop bar at the Art Hotel catches the last of the light well. Cocktails up there, pictures on the table, the square below and the Adriatic beyond it. Then down to Čakola for wine and a board of Istrian ham and cheese before anyone decides what to do about dinner.

Trieste takes coffee more seriously than anywhere else in Italy. It has its own vocabulary for ordering: an espresso is “un nero”, a macchiato is “un capo”. Illy was founded here. Caffè San Marco has been open since 1914 and James Joyce wrote Ulysses at one of its tables. Start the day here.

Into the Slovenian countryside in a 1970s vintage van. There is a man. There is a dog. There are truffles, and there is wine in the van, because of course there is. The dog finds the truffles. The man explains everything. You photograph both.

The truffle itself is an unprepossessing thing. Brown, knobbly, looks like something a dog dug up. Which is exactly what it is. What makes it interesting to photograph is everything around it: the van, the dog’s nose in the earth, the man’s hands, the forest floor, the wine being poured into a glass in the middle of nowhere.

It is the kind of day that is difficult to explain to people back home and very easy to show them.

Tonight is the last night in Piran. Dinner at Pirat, on the waterfront. Fresh catch, Malvazija, the harbour lights. The kind of dinner that doesn’t need improving.

You check out of Piran and head for Nova Gorica. Until 2004 this was a hard border between two countries. The town is split down the middle, one half Slovenia, one half Italy, and the smuggling tour makes full use of that history. You’re assigned a role, given a border pass, and told to get contraband past the customs officer without getting caught. Two hours. Very few people know this exists.

From there, Burano. The island the Venetians go to on their days off. The houses are painted in colours that have no business being that saturated, and the light in October does something to them that summer tourists never see. No crowds. Good for the camera. Good for the soul.

Then a boat to Venice island. Away from the main drag, the streets get narrow, the tourists thin out, and the city starts to look like itself. Street photography here is less about looking for the shot and more about staying out of your own way. The light, the water, the reflections, the people who live here and ignore all of it. You’ll find your own corners.

Then a boat direct to the airport. Possibly the only airport transfer in the world done entirely by water. As you pull away, the Campanile, the Doge’s Palace and the dome of Santa Maria della Salute line up across the lagoon in the October light, and just sit there. You’ll be looking back the whole way.