Having bid my folks a teary farewell, Jess and I threw the bags on our backs and took the train to our final stop in Italy: Vicenza. Jess's third cousins live in Vicenza and she had seen them on her previous trips to Italy. I had heard so much about them and was keen to meet them. There was Lina (Jess's Nonno's first cousin), her daughter Loridana and her husband Stefano. Loridana and Stefano also had children of their own - two girls named Martina and Giulia. ...

After our operatic night in Verona we hired a car and made our way to an apartment in La Spezia for a few nights. Why La Spezia? Because it was the best launching pad from which we could tour the Cinque Terre and Portofino. We were looking forward to these tours because they were private guided tours - something we hadn't yet experienced on this trip. Rather than stressing out about which bus to catch and where to buy tickets, we could just sit back and let the...

The travelling road show with my parents continued as we departed Venezia for another Venetian city, Verona. What was supposed to be a whole day in Verona turned out to be three quarters of a day at Venezia's train station due to some railway workers' strike. Melbourne, I'll never complain about your trains again. Ok, maybe I will. But not as much as I did that day about Italy's trains.After being stuck at Venezia station since 9:00am, we finally arrived in Ver...

The Trovato family reunion continued on to the iconic city of Venezia. Like Pompeii and Roma, Venezia is another one of those "seeing is believing places". I had always known of the famous city on the water that is Venezia but, of course, as soon as I saw the city for the first time, my immediate comment was "Wow! It's city on water". It just goes to show that, no matter how hard I try to acquire knowledge and sound intelligent, some pretty obvious and dopey th...

Following our fun times with new and old friends in Orvieto and Viterbo, we made our way to Firenze for more fun but with the family this time. And no, I'm not talking about some distant relative. My parents were flying over to join us for 10 days in the north of Italy before embarking on a river cruise along the Rhine and then visiting the family in Malta. Maybe it was the fact that they'd never spent this amount of time being parted with their "baby boy". Or ...