A: Tuesday was another side trip - just over an hour and a quarter by train to the medieval - then renaissance - walled city of Lucca, and with the station 5 minutes away, an easy trip - although our train got us into Lucca 40 minutes late. We explored the rather astonishing churches of this interesting city which escaped the bombs of WW 2 and so remains intact. The cathedral houses the "Volta Santa" which featured in a book I just read and so I was keen to s...

A: Monday: Today we made pasta and tiramisu and had a lovely evening with Elisabetta and Umberto. M: The day delivered the promised rain, so it was a good day to plan to be largely indoors. My first task was to get hold of a box to send some things home in - partly for ease of handling, and partly to leave some space for any purchases here or in Verona or Vietnam. I was at the post office just before 0815, in time to see the first customers and the reside...

A: On Friday we were due at the Uffiizi at 9am with our pre- booked tickets and Rick Steve's audio tour, and after going through security and up the four flights of stairs we were in for a real treat of Renaissance art. Rick Steves had lots of explanations and historical information eg regarding the development of art in the Renaissance from 2-D into more realistic and 3-D images. We wandered from room to room with lots of tour groups and once again reali...

M: If you can imagine a delightful hill town, looking down on wherever you live and only a 20 minute bus ride away - you begin to get the idea of Fiesole. That's where we spent most of Thursday. I guess like most places in Italy, it has a long history. In this particular case the Etruscans were the occupants from 800 or 900 BC, then the Romans around 283, where it was a place where young men were sent to learn the arts of augury - the process of reading signs -...

A: Getting our bags from our unit to the Riomaggiore station was quite a feat, and Hercules would have been proud of Mick- he managed to carry the largest ones down and then up a total of 114 steep and uneven stairs but the weather had cleared so this made the task a little easier (M: Something about the bags absorbing less water perhaps? ). Once at the Riomaggiore station it was a train to La Spezia, another to Pisa and a third to Florence . Our landlord Enri...