Before we start into the week’s activities, let us say we are fine and many hundreds of kilometres from the devastation in l’Aquila which is in a deep valley between two spines of the Appenine range. The news is on Italian TV all day and there is still much to do to get to the outlying villages reachable by narrow roads that are blocked. Our hearts go out to the people and families of the area. In the meantime we have travelled by sea from Sicily to Tuscany (Pisa, Wednesday night) and the news is still of aftershocks in the area [View Full Entry]

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Fortunately, the weather forecasters in Italy are no more accurate than our own back home. Monday was supposed to be cloudy but we did not see one all day - unless you want to count those ones hovering around the peak of Mount Etna, and they were probably the result of steam from snow melting on lava. We had hoped to climb the lower foothills of Etna and hike around her horizontally but the snow on Sunday made that idea ludicrous even for Canadians trying to escape winter. We drove up, anyway, to see what we could see: snowplows, snowboarders, chairlifts, [View Full Entry]

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We were awakened by a lot of noise and talking at about 3:00am on Monday morning. A few hours later the delicious smell of fresh bread wafted in our window. Later, when it got light and we looked out we realized that one of our neighbours across the narrow street is a bakery. If I can make it over there in my pyjamas by 6:30am I can get a crusty loaf for 1 euro. We drove the 5km along the shore to where the cable car will take you up the cliffs to Taormina. This is a swanky town with glitzy [View Full Entry]

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We had a lot to do in the five days we had an apartment in Massa Lubrense on the south coast of the Peninsula of Sorrento. This was to be our base to visit Mount Vesuvius and the ruins, the Amalfi Coast and the Island of Capri. The area has a number of villages connected by twisting narrow roads switching back and forth negotiating the steep slopes. Terraced fields held olive, orange and lemon trees as well as many gardens planted in the black earth. Our first venture was the famous Amalfi coast - a series of little villages clinging to [View Full Entry]

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Does it rain in paradise? Of course! Grapes and olives need water to grow. We awoke to fog and rain our first morning outside Siena in a refurbished bishop’s palace next to a monastery. Undaunted by the weather, we set out in our little car on SS222, the Chianti Trail. Sloping fields of vines in many straight lines; yellow-brown, very rocky soil; gnarled oaks, wrapped with green ivy, still clinging onto last year’s shiny brown leaves; regiments of cypress trees standing tall and proud. The road twisted through the hills past farms, fields and forest. We arrived in Castellani in Ch [View Full Entry]

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We took the early Eurostar out of Venice on the first cloudy day since we arrived. Dozens of heavily laden, barge-like canal boats were steaming across the ten kilometres of open lagoon between the mainland and Venice. Back on the mainland we saw cars and traffic for the first time in a week. We saw black earth, farmers ploughing fields, grain sprouting. Venice was as far north as we had planned to go. Now we were heading across Italy from the west coast to the east; to what a few years ago was a forgotten corner of Italy but is now [View Full Entry]

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I think it’s deductive reasoning to say if Italy is the number one tourist destination in the world then Venice is the number one tourist destination in Italy. We are about to discover why. There are no cars in Venice - a good thing as our apartment faces the street on three sides and I doubt if you could stretch a tape measure out to the eight-foot mark before you hit any the neighbouring buildings. Every second cross-street is a little canal over which is an elegant stone bridge with marble steps. Four, five and six storey buildings looming over a [View Full Entry]

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We were lucky to find a restaurant on Valentine’s Day in Florence. The place was a small club on a narrow cobblestoned street with maybe a dozen couples at small tables. The walls had what Darla called ‘that eclectic faux’ look. I thought it had ‘that badly scraped-off wall paper’ look with the final predominant colour being red interspersed with some green and bare plaster. We arrived at 8:15 but the place didn’t fill up until 9:30pm. We were the oldest couple, the only non-Italians and everybody else seemed to know each other. We seemed to be the only patr [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Rome is proving to be a greater sadness than expected. Usually one is excited at the prospects of moving on to the next destination, the next adventure. We dined at home again on our last evening...fresh potato gnocci with a carbonara sauce made from pancetta and the last of the provolone along with a salad of arugula and fresh greens. Except for the morning porridge, the fridge was bare again. This apartment has been central to our enjoyment of our stay in Rome. Dark oak floors and trim, pale washed stucco walls, the most comfortable bed a traveller ever slept [View Full Entry]

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We have been in Rome for over a week now. It’s hard to figure out where to begin the story - flying over the Swiss Alps and seeing a green Italy laid out before us from the window of the plane - or now as we are thinking of packing our bags to take the train to Florence some ten days later. We began as awestruck tourists visiting Rome and we will leave as though we have lived in Rome. We had a rooftop apartment for a week...as elegant an accommodation as could be imagined. Six floors up, 144 marble steps [View Full Entry]

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