Florence, sigh! Honestly you could spend a thousand days in that city and not regret a single one. Beautiful streets packed with ancient building, tick, magnificent squares with art on every corner, tick, fascinating history, tick, pizza, pasta and gelato coming out of your ears, tick. We spent out two days exploring the city on foot and, joy of all joys, our very reasonable hotel room had the most stunning view of the Duomo. We thoroughly enjoyed it, daytime, lit at night time, at all times really. Ben was bamboozled by the size and beauty of the thing. It was my favourite church by far. Not just the scale but the simplistic beauty of it. The outside is made up of three colours only, red, white and green, to symbolise the three virtues - faith, hope and charity - inside it is vast, light and open. Beautiful.

We spent a day, as all visitors to Florence should, looking at some of the most spectacular art the world has ever seen. The Uffizi gallery was rammed to the rafters but a good five hour stint allowed us to see works by Botticelli, Michealangelo, Da Vinici, Rubens and many, many more. I fell for a tiny one of the disciple Peter by David Ternier where Peter is looking exactly as I imagine him, so human and humble. It was wonderful.

While in the city we also took a tour on the history of the city, which used to be the capital of Italy. Our guide, an art historian, was amazingly informative leading us through 2000 years of history from waring families to mad easter festivals to murder in the Duomo. Florence has produced some of the worlds most amazing minds including Dante, Michaelangelo and Petrach. One of the main families in the city, the Medici's, also produced a number of Popes. One of whom was a famous agnostic and whose partying is said to have sent Martin Luther over the edge and kick started the reformation! Quite some legacy!

With heavy hearts we left the city (after the best pizza of my life I might add!) And headed to the Tuscan countryside where we are now resting up for a few days just outside Lucca. Lucca is your quintessential Tuscan town, wonderfully sleepy and providing us with long warm nights, fantastic food and wine and best of all, ice cream that last night we awarded the 2013 European Ice Cream Challenge award to as the best of our travels. I like to take some credit for the genius combination of chocolate and hazelnut gelato but the real genius has to be Venetos, who have been making gelato since 1927. You really can tell! Needless to say we are heading back there tonight and I already have my combination worked out. Me, obsessed? No!

Lots of love,

Nikki and Ben