Where to Travel in October, and Why the Season Turns in Your Favour

October is the month Parisians keep for themselves. The terraces are heated but not yet enclosed, the chestnut leaves turn along the Seine, and the city's great dining rooms run at full form without August's holiday churn.

Book Le Cinq for the grandest lunch in the city, then walk it off through the Tuileries to the Musée d'Orsay — timed entry in October is a ten-minute affair rather than an hour's queue.

Vienna does not have a high season in October so much as a reopening: the opera, the concert halls and the coffee houses all come back to life as the evenings draw in, and the city feels newly purposeful.

Split the day between the Kunsthistorisches — where the Bruegel room alone justifies the trip — and dinner at Steirereck, whose kitchen treats Vienna's market gardens as seriously as any three-star in Europe. Sacher, afterwards, is not optional.

The Matterhorn is never more photogenic than when the larches turn amber against the first snows, and October sits in the quiet seam between summer hikers and winter skiers.

Ride the Gornergrat early — the 294 peaks it surveys are clearest in the cold morning air — and stay at Mont Cervin Palace in town, where the terraces still catch afternoon sun.

October is Istanbul's most beautiful month: warm days, cool ferries, and light that flatters every mosque and minaret. The summer cruise crowds have gone, so Hagia Sophia's mornings are calm again.

Cross to Karaköy for dinner at Karaköy Lokantasi, the polished meyhane that has become the neighbourhood's table — book ahead, because October is when locals return to it too.

Everyone knows Kyoto in November, when the maples ignite and the city is booked solid. October is the insider's version: warm, green and walkable, with the temples nearly to yourself.

Take the bamboo grove at Arashiyama before eight, then Fushimi Inari at dusk, when the ten thousand gates empty out and the fox shrines glow under lanterns.