Ah Tuscany. Beautiful, hot, scenic, hot, lovely, hot Tuscany. Yes, Italy is experiencing its first heat wave of summer. A sticky, sweaty, police-patrolling-the-fountains-in-case-people-jump-in kind of heat wave. Yay. I’m not a summer person. Give me a rainy, cold day and I’ll make the most of it. Give me…
How to guarantee strange looks from every person standing near you: Take a flowery, china teacup, set it down on a 2000-year old ruin, and proceed to take a picture. Then be prepared to explain yourself. The choices for a Teacup Tale shot in Rome were endless. There…
A few of the places I’ve taken my teacup may have not been recognisable to some of you. But this one will be. After all, how can you not recognise the greatest architectural stuff-ups of all time? The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of Italy’s most iconic landmarks, for all…
While Tuscany and Umbria are the go-to regions when touring Italy, Le Marche is touted as an equally beautiful but less populated alternative. With rich farmland and twisting mountain roads inland and the Adriatic Sea on the coast, it’s the best of both worlds as far as a…
Italy isn’t a big country. You can drive from one side to the other in about two and a half hours. So it didn’t take us long to trade Rome’s crazy, narrow, city streets for countryside. Aside from our brief taxi trips, our experience on the Roman roads has been…
What little knowledge I had of Rome before arriving can be credited to Dan Brown. And yes I know it’s fiction, but Angels and Demons was still educational. To build on that education we joined another tour. This was our third for this city, but Rome is worth…
By the time I arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, nearly three weeks after leaving Vancouver’s Pacific Station, I had spent four and a half days on a train. I’d covered more than 6000km. It wasn’t all at once: I turned it into a three-week trip. But it was certainly…
Another hot summer’s day in Rome and another day marvelling at the city’s architectural feats. Is it possible there’s too much to see here? After a bit of emailing, we’d found a spot on another Walks of Italy tour – this time an early morning visit to the Colosseum. In…
I don’t know where the saying came from, but it’s a good thing the world didn’t take it to heart. If we all did as the Romans do, well, we’d need really good health insurance. The driving here is insane. Not as bad as I’ve seen in China…
Turn any corner in Rome and you come across something impressive – either for its beauty or simply the fact it was constructed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Very few man-made sights earn a “wow” from me, but this city is overloaded with incredible things to…
