Saturday-Monday 14-16/08/2010 106, 105, 104 After leaving the hostel near the Vatican I headed across town to the Sunshine Convent hostel, my home for the next 3 nights. This weekend happened to be the Feast of the Assumption, a national long weekend, which means that half of Rome was closed for the holidays. I checked into my private room and had a lazy afternoon. A small and quiet hotel, it is decorated with stuffed animals, fake flowers and doilies. My room i...

Friday 13/08/2010 107 So once again I ended up in St Peter's Square, simply because I had to go through there to get to where I wanted to go, which was the botanical gardens. I wandered back and forth across the Tiber River, on the many bridges that traverse it however you don't walk along the river as such, but along the roads that are raised up on either side. The edges of the river itself are a bit of a waste land full of empty bars and disused cycle paths. ...

Friday 06/08/2010 114 Today after an internet saga, we headed to the Castello di Vezio. However on the way we missed a turn, and with narrow road clinging to the edges of cliffs there was really nowhere to turn around so the GPS took us on a sphincter clenching, knuckle whitening detour up to the top of the next mountain and back. Upon finally arriving at our destination and relaxing a little we made our way through the narrow labyrinthine streets of Vezio. The ...

Friday 30/07/2010 121 Our last day in Tuscany and we headed to Siena. A smallish place, it is a walled medieval city centring on the Piazza del Campo which is the site of Siena's insane twice yearly horserace Il Palio. Siena is divided into 17 districts, and 10 are randomly chosen to complete. The jockies ride bareback and the only rule is that you are not allowed to pull on the reins of another riders horse. We quite happily wandered around the city, everywhere...

Friday 23/07/2010 128 Today we boarded a vaporetto to visit Venice's outlying islands. Our first stop was Murano, famous for it's glass factories. The glass blowers were removed from the main islands to Murano as the fear was that their furnaces would cause fires that would destroy Venice, which at the time was largely built out of wood. After watching a demonstration of glass blowing and purchasing some genuine Murano glass...on Murano we headed on. Our next st...