We’ve adopted the eminently sensible Mediterranean habit of siesta, followed by pre-dinner passegiata (evening stroll).  Last night we passegiata’d to the Molo Audace, or pier, to see the sunset, and the lights of the Piazza.  Most of Trieste was doing the same; the outdoor cafes were buzzing.  We retreated to eat our chicken schnitzel (gluten […]

Wanting to minimise any physical exertion, I booked a ticket for a hop on hop off bus tour.  The first thing I learned was that my clever rhyming heading from the previous post was incorrect.  The locals pronounce it Triest-ay (as if there was an accent on the final “e”).  After a nice circuit of […]

We left the ship in the usual unceremonious fashion at 8.30am.  Checkin time at our apartment, less than 10 minutes walk away, was 3pm.  How to kill 6.5 hours in Trieste?  Our luggage could be dropped at 11am so that was something.  Ian found some shady bench seats in a small, quiet piazza, so we […]

Any travel guide or blog about Catania will describe this southern Sicilian city as “gritty”.  Today I found out why.  Not because of its long association with the mafia, or its rough around the edges persona.  It’s literally gritty.  There is fine, powdery, black ash everywhere.  And I mean everywhere.  It forms little piles in […]

We woke to find ourselves already docked in Messina, Sicily.  Today’s excursion took us by bus to Taormina, about an hour south.  Taormina is most famous for its Roman ampitheatre, and as the location for series 2 of The White Lotus TV series (which we don’t watch). The bus ride took us across some very […]

We snuck past Ischia and sailed into the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius towering over its southern end.  Naples is a very large and very busy port, with multiple ferries, an icebreaker in dry dock, and the Costa Smeralda at the berth opposite ours.  We passed the little lighthouses at the end of each breakwater at […]

The past few days have been spent on the move.  On Sunday we were up at 5am, to catch an airport shuttle at 7am.  We flew from Toulouse to Madrid to Rome, and I spent the day trying to remember which language I should be using.  Toulouse airport, being the home of Airbus, has an […]

FINITO. Well actually not quite, we found all these nice photos on our phones from Tirano from where we caught the Bernina Express into Switzerland, yesterday Today is our last day in Milan, and indeed Italy, so we ventured forth one final time, to see what we could find in the centro storico. There was […]

Ilze and I spent our last day in Florence walking back over the Ponte Vecchio. We then made the rather tedious climb up through rather dull side streets to a car park called the Piazzale Michelangelo. Why? You ask. Because when you turn around there is this. I have often pondered those words since I […]