Today we were lucky enough to take a tour with one of Trip Adviser's star tour guides for Mian, Giacomo.We started at the Duomo where he took us to the terraces to admire this beauty from above. Made completely from Marble, the Dukes of Milan donated a complete mountain to the building of the Duomo so that it could always be made and maintained in a common stone. We're pretty sure we saw the quary on the way to Milan yesterday. 400 years in the making it ...

Late last night I realised it was a four hour run to Bellagio. Sadly that meant not visiting Luzern again, or spending very much time in Lugano. Driving down through the Lepontine Alps the view to the peaks were buried under cloud - but what a vista - lush green hills and a dark grey skies left a picture of a winter Switzerland in my mind for the second time. We headed into the 17kn long Gotthard tunnel through a winter vista and emerged into brilliant sunlight a...

Florence in just a few hours north or Rome. We got here just in time for hte sun to burn through and give us yet another sunny day in Italy! Rome has all the ancient Roman history to expect, the Vatican has acquired so much art you could get lost in the beauty of it all for an age. But Florence has the history of that art. The Medici cultivated the arts and sciences here with so much history of it to be felt. We talk a walking tour around the city today. The Mus...

With the Rome Marathon on this morning we headed out to Ostia Antica to take in some more unimaginable history. The ruins of this city date back to a few hundred years AD. The normality of life is hard to appreciate. around the amphitheatre there are little offices where souvenirs stores would have been. The arcade of commercial stores has each stores purpose depicted in Mosaics on the floor in front of the store, no one could read. From Ostica we headed bac...

As we approached the waterfront for Venezia it was difficult to take it all for real. In front of us the prison where they housed Casanova, the Bridge of Sighs, Piazza San Marco, that insane facade on the basilica, or chapel? The sun was out lighting the whole place up like a movie set. We strolled for an hour, took in a glass blowing exhibition (Max couldn't be convinced to skip it) before some more strolling, shopping, then we settled into the Piazza for an ...