Summary
Italy was a bit of mixed bag for us. We had some good weather and we had some bad weather, mainly bad weather actually. It seemed like it was every second day it rained and of course we were here at the end of winter so the temperature was pretty cold as well. We also didn't find it as inviting as a lot of the other countries we'd been to. We think we worked out that we're more countryside people as oppose to city people and apart from Cinque Terra and Tuscany, most of the sights we visited were in the cities. On the other hand we saw some amazing architecture, roman ruins and of course all of the famous artists and artwork.

From the French border we headed along the coast, through Genoa and the beautiful scenery of Cinque Terra. We're definitely coming back here in warmer weather. We then headed south and did the leaning tower in Pisa and spent a day in Florence marvelling at all the art, architecture and enjoying some wicked gelato. After Florence we headed south through Tuscany, magnificent, until we reached the coast at Orbertollo and then headed along the coast into Rome. We had 2 awesome days in Rome, visiting the Vatican and all the Roman Ruins, only to return to the car at the end of the second day to find someone had broken in and trashed it. They didn't get much but they stuffed the lock on the drivers door and trashed the inside of the van.

From Rome we headed south and had the 'best pizza in the world' in Naples, climbed Mt Vesuvius and of course explored the ruins of Pompei. We navigated some beautiful snow capped mountains across the centre of the country on our way to Alberobello where we felt like we were apart of a fairy tale walking through the cone-shaped houses. We finally made it to Brindisi where we caught a ferry across to Vlora in Albania.

In total we clocked up 2022 km's and the average price of diesel per litre we paid was about 1.40E (about $2.10 AUD) so our budget got blown out of the water over the course of 2 weeks.

Overall we did enjoy Italy, just a few things seemed to get us down, mainly the break-in and we think we both had a case of the 'winter blues' as we battled the rain and the cold right through our trip. We're both glad we did it, we may just come back and do it differently next time - probably try and immerse ourselves into the food and culture a bit more during a time when it's not so cold and wet.

Speedometer: 141,363 km's