The Italian Adventure..or do i mean Disaster?

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We have made it to Sicily! Where is that? Well as south as possible as we can go in Italy. Why are we here? Excellent question! We are flying to Malta. How did we get here? Let me tell you.

The last blog ended as we left France and I was scared of the unknown and having to start a new adventure, after all, France had been very good to us. So no surprises it was a total shock almost as soon as we hit Italy, the scene changed dramatically and we are surrounded by mountains, mountains everywhere! Did you know Italy is pretty much mountains and they have to build their roads and highways by tunneling through the mountains??? Cos I certainly didn't. But at least that's something I can handle 😊

We had done our homework and knew what we wanted to see and because of a wonderful thing called hindsight I think its best to separate out Italy into 2 parts, the North of Italy i.e. Rome and above, and the South of Italy, everything below Rome.

Northern Italy

Our trusty Lonely Planet guide pointed us to begin in Levanto, a little town that has immediate access to Cinqueterra - the 5 villages - that are pretty much only accessible by train or walking - we (i) opted for walking of course. It is a day trip and one that everyone should do. The hike is amazing and as it suggests links the 5 villages which are built on the rocky coast and provide beautiful views of the crashing seas and the villages are just so quaint with their narrow walkways and a maze of stairs. I was feeling good about Italy except for some minors things such like paying by card was more difficult, reception is terrible because of the mountains and gas for the motorhome was a little harder to acquire, just part of the daily delimmas when travelling, ya know :s

Next major on our hit list was Florence but our guide was telling us there were a few towns worth visiting on the way:

Carrarra - famous for its marble and provided a surprisingly good tour

Lucca - a town perimetered by a fortified by a 5km wall which you can go for a lovely morning run

Pisa - well we all know whats in Pisa, hundreds of attempted pictures to try and capture oneself holding up the leaning tower. I googled pictures of people posing with the tower, one particular one was taken of a whole lawn of people posing with the caption "Thriller Night". If you can imagine it and you're not laughing then google it, quite funny

We make it to Florence, well the suburbs of Florence, and it's just a 15 minute tram ride into town which is excellent. It's best we start with a walking tour because we have noooooo idea what we want to look at. I think the best part of Florence is actually just walking around and soaking in the atmosphere because its just so lovely. We spent the next day seeing some of the musts, Michelangelos David, Piazza della Signoria and of course the amazing sunset from Piazza Michelangelo. Just beautiful even if there are a few smelly gypsy's hanging around. It was during the course of our Florence visit we stopped in for a few drinks at an Irish Pub, for comfort, and we left with my slightly tipsy last minute purchase of 2 x Andrea Bocelli tickets in Lajatico, Bocelli's home town where he makes a performance each year, so this was our next destination via another beautiful town - San Gimignano, a beautifully towered town on a hill and a well received suggestion from a family member. We actually had torrential rain bucket down on us as we took an evening stroll around town which was just hilarious, we hadnt seen rain for how long and then it came, all at once!

We found a night spot in Lajatico about a 15 minute walk from the Teatro del Silenzio, it was lucky we arrived around lunch time that day as about an hour later they closed the roads and people had to take a shuttle bus from the next town 3 km away just to reach the town. They call it the Teatro del Silenzio or Theatre of Silence because its only there for when Bocelli performs each year, all other times of the year its empty, silent. It was pretty exciting, for me, I love Con te Partiro - and I was praying he would sing it. Eamon had warned me not to get my hopes up and just as well he did because he didn't sing it. What was worse what that it also turned out the be an opera, not specifically a Bocelli performance, so while he did sing it was in face makeup and he was wearing a puffy dress with some other famous opera people dressed alike, all singing in Italian and apparently to a story line. Eamon and I sat through 2 and half hours of "what the hell is going on", it was pretty exhausting and I don't think i will be going back to the opera any time soon, Eamon probably never. But in hindsight of course its pretty funny especially because I had to ban Eamon from surfing the net during the performance and of course he sulked.

We woke up the next morning and had a 10 hour drive ahead of us to get to Rome. We were officially leaving Tuscany which has been beautiful. I've found that so far all these towns and places we have been to all have their own unique identity which makes them special, if they were not collectively in the same region you may not bother making the trip so its amazing that Tuscany have these.

Rome. We arrived and happy to have accommodation. We decided not to park up, Rome is a big place and there are not many places to park quietly and feel safe. We opted to stay in AirBnB accommodation, a nice break from the Wiz which has continued to swelter in the heat - when will it end!!! I could go on all day about how hot it has been but lets get back to the important stuff. Like old stuff, really old stuff! Colosseum, Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, Trevi Fountain (inclusive of construction), Spanish Steps and the list goes on. There is a lot to do in Rome and we only really only hit the ancient side of it and we had already been in town 4 days. We decided we would stay another night on the quiet street we had parked on near our accommodation. Bags packed, less than an hour from leaving our accommodation it happened....we got robbed. We couldn't believe it, all of our material items gone, like that, and we had just had our laptop fixed the day before. It was a disaster and the beginning of (what felt like) the worst 12 days.

Southern Italy

So trying not to be bummed we continued the trip heading south. When people say don't drive in Naples then listen to them, it is chaotic in a car let alone a camper, people just drive wherever they want and whenever they want. Oh that's a single lane, I can make it a double move over or i'll make you, its absolutely no surprise that we have seen tons and tons of roadside shrines with pictures of the deceased. Eams is definitely going to return a highly skilled driver after all this experience. We had noticed that since leaving Rome that the quality of the roads had decreased and yes the drivers had got worse but we didn't think it would be this bad. It also became apparent that other things seemed to be different, like we were heading into a distinctively different Italy and it was slightly off putting. We only spent 2 nights in Naples, I can confirm the pizza is amazing but you need to be prepared that other things are not. The streets are full of rubbish and I'm surprised the buildings aren't falling down, but it is Naples and i have read that you either love it or hate it.

We thought that Pompeii would be better and it was, it was clean for a start and a good distraction from the robbery and exciting to be left to explore this ancient town, it's so big though you need days to properly explore. It was hot, yes here i go again, so it was exciting that we were heading down to the beach to relax. Unfortunately motor homes are prohibited from the Amalfi coast so we left the Wiz at our campsite in Salerno and terribly easy caught the tourist bus all the way to Positano for a day trip. Personally i think Positano was the best town, it was clean for starters and there were really beautiful shops but the beach, admittedly I don't think its beaches are very nice at all. I'm probably going to offend some people here but the beaches aren't great in Italy, it just isn't the French Riviera ha! It also doesn't help that i'm not great at beaching, I get restless sun bathing, I hate getting salt water in my eyes and sulk at being dunked.

As unpleasant as the latter half of Italy has felt, we have been looking on the bright side of many things. For example, Southern Italians don't appear to speak as much English which forces us to use our limited knowledge of Italian which is probably a good thing. Knowing a few words has really come a long way but its much easier to understand than respond though. One of our most common mistakes are between the words ficile and felice in italian. One means easy and the other means happy - and often find that after using one word or the other we have used the wrong one and probably look silly, but at the time we were very chuffed to "speak italian".

So we are still heading further south to head to Sicily where we are flying to Malta from, we decided to head over early and spend a few days looking a round. At this stage, after being robbed I was feeling very down. I was really starting to feel homesick, i was missing friends, family and of course our beloved Friday and needed a change in atmosphere, so far since leaving Rome it had been very unsettling and there were tears (mine) frequently. There was a point that i wasn't sure that i wanted to continue but we had flights booked for Malta in a few days so if Sicily was a bomb there was still hope. So how was Sicily? A bomb haha, but we trudged through and headed our to the Palermo catacombs which surprisingly were good, better than Paris and way more creepy. We actually arrived during siesta, the period of time between 1ish and 4ish that Italy shuts down to go home, eat, sleep before returning to start up again, so we had some time to kill. It was here that i picked my first prickly pear! Prickly pear is a cactus fruit, and as a word of warning should be handled with tongs and heavy duty gloves otherwise you get a hand full of hair thin prickles on your hand that requires your partner to surgically remove them with tweezers, all the fun times seem to happen to me, im currently recalling my incident with the poison ivy.... We also went to visit their active volcano, Mount Etna, but guess who decided to crack their radiator...the Wiz of course. She's currently parked up in secure airport parking so can worry about her when we return from Malta.

Here's hoping we have no worries but until then, wish us luck!! xxx

PS Lack of photos is not due to laziness, our camera was taken so its all camera phone from here!!

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