So today we got up at half 8 so we could be in town for 9.45 ready for our Tuscan cooking tour. We met up just off palazzo vecchio with Elise, our tour guide who spoke excellent English having lived in London for 14 years. Our tour group was small, just 10 people, which was nice. First we got a walking tour of Florence which was great.As you know we kinda wrote yesterday off because of the heat so it was good to finally be able to see some of Florence under bett...

So today the heat broke us. We were awake and checking out of our Milan hotel by 8am and caught our 2 hour train to Florence. It was a lovely train journey as the train was so spacious and we even had a little electric button on the table to control the blind which was cool. Arriving in Florence was instantly mental. The train station was so busy and it was overwhelming. We had a last minute change of apartment in Florence due to some complications and so we had...

Well today has been one of the best days of my life, feeling very blissful right now! We got up early so we could catch the 8am train to Lake Maggiore. It was only a half hour train journey so we made it onto the lake nice and early too, giving us 13 hours to enjoy ourselves! As soon as we pulled up at the station I was awestruck by the scenery. Lake Maggiore sits on the Swiss/ Italian border and is a beautiful mixture of both. With the vast lake in front of ...

So today we thought we'd take it easy. After a long lie in we made our way to Bergamo. Bergamo is a city I've stayed in a few times, just a short train journey from Milan. It's a really pretty medieval town with a lower and upper town which can be reached by funicular. We ended up spending about 4.5 hours in Bergamo, just lazily strolling up and down the little cobbled streets. We took the funicular up to the top so we could take some lovely Landscape shots (wh...

Today was another early start, although made better by the fact I actually had a good nights sleep! We were out the hotel by 7.15am and on our way to the central station to meet our tour group to head to Lake Garda. We met up and found there was only going to be six of us on the tour so it was quite intimate. There were 2 American men, one from Washington who worked as an agriculturalist forecaster and one from Minneapolis who worked as a bio psychology professo...