It’s always tricky navigating an unfamiliar airport, especially when it’s not completely new (because you have arrived there before), but your memories are extremely vague.  A trickle of anxiety dampens all your decisions and a constant refrain of ‘Well, I don’t remember that at all’ clouds every choice. However,  the train station for Fiumincino airport…

A common ritual in the Italian restaurants we have frequented in the UK is the overly large pepper grinder. This suggestively masculine object makes an appearance immediately after the food has arrived and is usually wielded with a dramatic (and equally suggestive) flourish. It’s ubiquitous. However, it was noticeable in its absence from every restaurant…

On our last full day we moved northwards, towards the more well-known (to English tourists at least) towns of Ostuni and Martina Franca. Crossing from Gallipoli to Brindisi, the countryside was flat (no surprises there), rocky and barren; fields of vines and olives gradually started to appear as we moved eastwards. All the olives were…

All told we spent two weeks in Apuglia, most of it in the far South. After taking the airport bus from Lecce to Brindisi airport, meeting the Chapel Allerton crew, and hiring a car, we drove to a villa on the Adriatic coast near Lecce (Torre Chianca to be precise). To be perfectly honest, had…

Ravenna is all about early Christian churches and mosaics. They make a big thing of them – even incorporating them into their street signs – and there are frequent groups of tourists being led around the sites , all wearing headphones, with someone muttering into a microphone. Most of the people on the tours we…

Sometimes referred to as the ‘Florence of the South’,  we found Lecce  more enjoyable than Florence. Was it touristy?  Yes. Did it feel like a ‘Disney does Baroque’ theme park?  A bit. Did we still like it?  Yes! It’s the stone and the light. Lecce is built of a specific kind of sandstone (Lecce stone)…

It’s not that we violently disliked Florence, it just felt oppressive. The heat, the humidity, the crowds, the awful place we stayed… So getting up betimes and heading for the train station felt like an escape. There were few people about and it felt cooler – but still smelt secondhand and stale. At the station,…

We retraced our steps to Bologna, having allowed a substantial period of time in which to navigate the station.  As it happened,  we got an even earlier train, so had even  more time – those pre-departure nerves operate for train journeys as well as planes.  We seem chronically unable to arrive anything less than double…

I have written two drafts about the mosaics (three if you count the aborted first attempt), complete with carefully edited and select pictures.  Despite clicking on the Save option (I used the laptop),  both have been lost.  The first loss I didn’t repine about too much as I felt it gave me an opportunity for…

If I think about ‘Italy’, I somehow automatically think of a Southern country.   Yet using Google maps to locate us, I realised just how far north we really are.  This despite all the travel time from Tirano to Verona: really we just did a sideways U shape,  going mostly east to Milano (with a bit…