Ancona, Italy

Visiting the industrial port city of Ancona in Italy was not a result of having it on any kind of travel bucket list. It was simply to fulfill a transport connection - a ferry ride across the Adriatic Sea to the UNESCO Heritage harbour town of Split, Croatia. Leaving Italy for the last time made us nostalgic. One of the downsides of writing blog posts almost 12 months after the travel date is that the sentimental feelings sweep back. However as this post will attest, our memories of Ancona were of relief (at making it on-board the ferry) rather than a trip filled with amazing historical sites, delicious food and wine.

Rimini, Italy

Winter in Melbourne is thankfully not as harsh as in the Northern Hemisphere. Today's Saturday activities kicked off with a boxing class at the local gym and then a few hours playing tourist in Melbourne's Docklands and St Kilda Beach. Both activities parallel with the subject of this blog - a throwback to August 2015 when we visited the seaside resort of Rimini on route to the dockside port of Ancona.
Rimini sits on the east coast of Italy where it meets the Adriatic Sea. Famous for kilometres of beach and thousands of umbrellas, it is the playground of locals and tourists enjoying the long hours of Mediterranean Summer sunshine.

Ravenna, Italy - Part 2

Mosaic is a style of artwork where images are created by assembling pieces of coloured glass or stone. In our previous visit to Jordan, we had visited a mosaic factory and witnessed the labour intensive task of individually cutting and gluing pieces of material to create beautiful masterpieces. Our visit to Ravenna was driven by a desire to see the UNESCO listed Byzantine era mosaics. For conservation reasons, we were not allowed to photograph some artworks, but the memories of their colour, scale and beauty will stay with us for ever.

Ravenna, Italy - Part 1

Ravenna is a city in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. It is a city perfect for history-culture nerds like ourselves. Ravenna's claim to fame sits with its past life as the capital city of the Western Roman Empire, capital of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths; then part of the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of the Lombards.
Like many other cities that have been swapped over by different ruling cultures, the city is rich in monuments.For its size, it has an amazing 8 UNESCO listed sites - of which we managed to see 7 in a single day.

Bologna, Italy

Whilst we lived in London, finding the inspiration (and time) to blog was driven by the need to record down all the memories of cultural sites visited that were so intriguingly different to what we had grown up with in Melbourne.
But now at the cusp of our 5 month anniversary of returning to Australia, although we have only managed a handful of posts in this time-frame - a resurrection of this hobby is now underway and (fingers crossed) we will complete the full set of posts on our 5 month holiday before 2016 ends. This next post leans heavily to one of our favourite travel pastimes - eating cured meats and drinking wine.

Bologna, Italy

Bologna, capital of Emilia-Romagna region of Italy is known by three nicknames - the "Learned One" in reference to its university; the "Red One" for the many terracotta building tiles; and the "Fat One" in honour of the cuisine. We came to visit for the food: from the meat based pasta sauce 'ragu' that gave its name to bolognese sauce; to the mortadella sausage speckled with cubes of fat. We ate many local delicacies and our tip for future travellers would be to bring a large suitcase as you will no doubt find some gourmet goodies that you would wish to bring back home as a reminder of this foodie city.

Siena, Italy

Siena is a city in Tuscany, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for a beautiful cathedral, medieval buildings and a street horse race - the Palio. However we did not get to see this famous spectacle, as we visited outside of racing season with our trip coinciding with a May Bank Holiday long weekend. Siena was just one part of this Italian holiday - as we flew into Bologna, routed via Florence and ended up flying back to London from Milan. With so many great cities visited, we enjoyed some amazing food and stunning architecture over the three day break.

Genoa, Italy

Genoa - capital city of Liguria, historic maritime power player, birthplace of Christopher Columbus, origin of oily but addictive pesto. With so many claims to fame, there were plenty of reasons for our visit. However, the real purpose was practical in nature - we needed a launch-pad for travels down the Cinque Terre coast (see separate blog post). But it did not play second fiddle to some pretty coastal scenery. We had a great time over two days exploring the harbour, Old Town (one of the largest in Europe) and eating great local foods.

Cinque Terre, Italy

Cinque Terre - the UNESCO World Heritage listed stretch of coastline has 'five villages' painted with Starburst lolly colours. This trip was made over the Easter break where we had a couple of days to visit the sites and another day to explore the maritime city of Genoa (detailed in a separate blog post). We visited Cinque Terre knowing that it would offer the best parts of a holiday in the one place - great food and wine, pretty laneways to explore artwork, seaside and scenery. However we did luck out with the weather. The rain arrived and didn't clear up until our last day. But besides the need to wear bright plastic ponchos all the time we had an amazing trip.

Positano, Italy

We traveled down the Amalfi Coast on the first of our final three days in Italy with a mini-bus driver Antonio who had a slight facial resemblance to Roger Federer. A Sorrento local, he knew the coastline well and agreed to take us through the most scenic route through villages.The trip down the coast was punctuated by spontaneous karaoke sessions by the girls in the back seat, photo stops where we admired how the road had been cut into the sheer cliff face that large coach drivers battled with traffic to fit on the correct side of the road.

Naples, Italy

We arrived in Naples on Day 7 and 8 of the trip and on first impressions, the city had many beautiful qualities - a wide bay full of cruise ships from around the Mediterranean; a UNESCO World Heritage listed Old Town; a number of imposing fortresses that would have rebelled any invading flotilla; and of course being the birthplace of pizza.
However, our first thoughts on arriving at Naples train station wasn't as positive as it appeared chaotic, dirty and it was lucky that we had organised a driver to pick us up as the city itself is very large and perfect for a tourist to get lost easily.

Pisa and Lucca, Italy

The day after we arrived in Florence we felt the need to explore the region. We took the train to Pisa and stayed for a couple of hours, sipping on Italian granita while we completed a range of poses with the famous monument.
Then, we decided to work our way further south to the medieval town of Lucca that had once featured on an episode of Top Gear. There are so many pretty old towns in Tuscany that we wished we had more time to just zip by train to each one and walk around with a gelati in our hands.

Florence and Rome, Italy

Florence - city of art and culture and birthplace of the Renaissance movement. The city's place on our European 'to do' list had been guaranteed after we had watched countless documentaries about the great painters and palaces of Italy.
However, as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, we were conscious that the place could be uncomfortably crowded during the 40+ degree Mediterranean summer. And we were not wrong. Thick crowds plus heat radiating off sandstone walls and cobblestone pavements, made sightseeing incredibly tiring.

Milan, Italy

Our journey to Milan started off with the romantic notion of travelling by train through the Alps into the fashion capital of the world. However, Trenitalia (Italy's version of National Rail) found it quite amusing to send us a carriage train that perhaps last ran in the 70's that contained stuffy 6-seater compartments where the seat numbers no longer corresponded to the boarding pass and it was someone's job to put post-it notes an all the windows to re-number the seating - austerity at its finest moment!

Italy Road Trip

A few blog posts hardly do justice to describing the amazing 10 day holiday spent in Italy over the August Bank Holiday weekend with a great bunch of Melbourne expat friends - Wai, Roopa, Farrah, Rob and Allee; the best Italian food we have eaten, gorgeous Mediterranean sunshine and seeing some of the most historic and scenic places in the world.
Thank you to everyone (and of course especially Olie) for organizing Mei's surprise 30th birthday present and also part of a joint holiday for Allee and keeping it all a secret for so many months.
Truly grateful and overwhelmed by the amount of effort that went into making this trip possible.

Venice, Italy

A fortnight ago, we traveled to Venice in celebration of Olie's birthday. The city featured highly on both of our top 10 cities list and ideally we would have loved to have been there during the festivities of Carnival; but hotel and flight prices convinced us to defer the trip to later in the year. Coincidentally, the weekend we booked in turned out to be timed with another famous Venetian festival - Festa del Redentore, so we ended up paying 'festive' prices for our holiday accommodation but there was a lot of atmosphere in town with hundreds of tourist and locals joining into the celebrations.

Sardinia, Italy

Our early May Bank holiday weekend was spent in a private villa overlooking the Mediterranean with 8 girls: Mei, Farrah, Steph, Kate, Carly, Harriet,  Alex and Claire. Olie was the only boy in the house, It was lucky he had grown up with three sisters as at times, he had to tap into his feminine side when hair braiding became one evening's activity, Spice Girls hit the playlist and dinner time conversation turned to 'who was the best boyfriend character on Sex and the City.' But the great weather, beach, turquoise waters, wholesome Italian food (plenty of pasta) made it all worthwhile.

Rome, Italy

When in Rome do as the Romans do. Seek out and conquer. And this we did. We managed to get a lot done in the 40 or so hours spent in this amazing city last weekend. During our stay we covered as many travel bases as possible - we sampled the local cuisine, visited the main tourist traps, felt the city vibe the day the Prime Minister resigned (lots of police around and even more international journalists), took in our dose of culture and history by visiting the Vatican City (and mentally comparing it the Dan Brown inspired movies) and saw some amazing artwork by the great Renaissance masters.