Ferraris, Nonnas and Primadonnas

Although we wished that our little blue Fiat was a Ferrari, it did the job well and got us to Pisa, where Andrea climbed the leaning tower. It was very interesting to see a building coming out of the ground at the wrong angle. It gave us the feeling we had had one too many bevvies on the drive there. It was also interesting to imagine Gallileo up there dropping cannon balls off the top. There was not a whole lot else to do in Pisa, so we hit the road again and headed off through the Italian countryside to...


Florence is a world famous town and has been, ever since some little known artist called Michelangelo carved a guy called David out of a chunk of marble. Some people told us not to bother with the two hour queue to get into the Galleria D´Acedemia, but we were both astounded by the workmanship of the five metre monster which towered above us. We stood and stared for a long long time. It was definitely worth the wait. And as if this dose of culture was not enough, we visited the Uffuzi Museum down the road the following morning. The Uffizi is home to original artworks from Da Vinci, Botticelli and Raphael, just to name a few other no namers. They were OK. Nothing special, really. We´ve both seen better stuff at garage sales. NOT. The three hours we spent in the gallery was nowhere near enough. But we had an important date to keep in...


Pompeii is in the running for the medal for being the filthiest, seediest city that either of us have ever been to. That is a big statement considering some of the things we have seen in our adventures. No wonder the guidebook recommends it to be done as a day trip from nearby Naples. Uncollected mountains of garbage, graffiti, car wrecks, pollution and rampant prostitution made for a less than pretty city. We managed to get out alive and see the amazing ruins of the old city of Pompeii, which managed to get itself buried by the fallout from the eruption of the nearby volcano, Mount Vesuvius. This tragic event left the world with a perfectly preserved historical record of the life of the ancient Romans. It was getting close to lunch time, so we thought we´d have lunch in nearby...



Naples is the birthplace of PIZZA. We´re sure you´ve heard of the stuff. The Margherita was invented here a couple of hundred years ago (how well researched is this blog?!?). We decided to do our own investigation. We were in for a rude shock. We managed to spend over one hour in bumper to bumper traffic watching the following offences take place: people driving on the footpath, people driving on the tramlines, people not double but triple parking, people driving over median strips to get where they were going. These are just a few examples of what we saw from inside our nice, blue, unscratched, shiny hire car. We abandoned the investigation post haste and headed for...

Rome.