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...

A: Sunday Sadly we had to leave our lovely little Rome apartment after four wonderful weeks. It was time to head to the Cinque Terre for two nights, staying in an apartment in Riomaggiore. This involved a taxi to Termini, a pre- booked train to La Spezia and another to Riomaggiore. In all the train travel took four hours and was uneventful. Once in Riomaggiore we had to follow directions given by Agostino by email to La Scogliera (The Reef) at Salita Castel...