Florence has been a busy few days. We have stayed just one street away from the Santa Croce, a church and public square, which it turns out is the main leather district - much to Mum's delight. So after navigating car parking and the killer stairs up to our apartment with all the luggage we set out to explore these shops and get our bearings. Yesterday morning Mum and I were out again delving further into the leather shops while Tom and Dad visited the Ponte Vec...

Yesterday we arrived for our night in Venice and had the perfect entrance by ferry up the Grand Canal to Piazza San Marco. After making it to our hotel through swarms of pigeons in the Piazza (much to Mum's delight) we wandered the small streets of the San Marco area over to the Rialto Bridge. Our room looked over a lovely little canal and it was fascinating to watch how they move people, food and building materials around the place on boats, gondolas and weird...

On Saturday after a mammoth and stressful day of driving we arrived in the beautiful Menaggio on the gorgeous Lake Como! We chose to drive through Switzerland rather than France on our way to Italy and this turned out to be quite the wrong decision. Instead of being the fastest route, we ended up in a huge traffic jam outside and all around Luzern where we only moved 6km in nearly 2 hours! Luckily we found an alternate route, arriving only 4 hours later than plan...