TEN ITALIANO MUSINGS 10. BREAD - The Italians love to serve bread with meals, but they seem to prefer it if the bread is hard, so that it hurts your mouth. Weird. I only found soft bread at one place, which was the hotel in Venice. Oh yeah, no toast options for breakfast. 9. STICKERS - Italians don't seem to believe in souvenir stickers, there were very few options. It doesn't seem hard does it? A cheap and common souvenir medium, which shouldn't be hard to sel...

WATER WORLD It was time to visit proper tourist Venice today. Unfortunately it rained all day, which did indeed put a dampener on proceedings (pun-tastic). It's an awesome place and is definitely worth checking out, unless you get seasick I guess. It's very cool though, you'll never see another place like it. We had a proper gondola ride (in the rain), which was fun, although one of the other couples from our tour group got engaged on their gondola. That's som...

VERONA AND THE ROAD TO VENICE On the way to Venice we stopped in at Verona, which is supposed to be the home of the balcony which gave that famous stoner Shakespeare the visual influence to pen Romeo and Juliet. That's actually not true. Sorry to burst your bubble there, but unfortunately it's just some balcony on a nice old building and random punters write theirs and their lovers' names on a wall nearby in texta. I reckon our engraved padlock on the bridge in...

THE GLORY OF ROME Whoa, epic day of being Roman. Today we saw the most amount of old stuff for the whole trip. Old crap in Rome is totally awesome, cos it means ancient ruins and Gladiator-related grouse-ness, as well as monuments named after me and the missus (Arch of Constantine - that's right, where's your monument?). We started off in a different country - Vatican City - for a short guided tour, which was awesome. Heaps of unbelievable artwork that was cent...

WHEN IN ROME... Alright! We've arrived safely in Rome. There's a lot of very cool stuff here, like really old awesome stuff. Before we got into the city, however, we stopped in on a little town, the name of which will forever be etched into my brain, but does escape me for the moment... Orvieto. I had to check Google Maps for that. It was like an old medieval town on top of a hill, and had some very awesome buildings and narrow Ye Olde streets and laneways. T...