Champagne For Everyone
17/06/18 I’ve mentioned before that my French geography is not great, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me when I realised that we were on the… Read more »
Category: Heritage
The Great Glass Elevator to the Alps
27/05/18 We left the large sosta in Celle Ligure on the Sunday morning, along with many other Italian vans who had been weekending there. Before we departed Paul did his… Read more »
A Whistle Stop Tour of Florence
23/05/18 Florence is on many people’s ‘must do’ lists for Italy. It hadn’t made it to the top of our list on the way south, when we visited Pisa and… Read more »
Back in Tuscany
22/05/18 After the Monte Sibillini we were planning to head for the Apuan Alps, a small offshoot of the Apennines that sits behind the coast of northern Tuscany. It was… Read more »
An Unexpected Stop in Civitella del Tronto
16/05/18 North of the Gran Sasso mountains is the Monti della Laga area. The two mountainous areas form one national park but are very different in nature. The sharp limestone… Read more »
A City under Reconstruction
08/05/18 Between the Majella national park and our next stop in the Gran Sasso national park we decided to stop in L’Aquila. Guidebooks have little to say about L’Aquila at… Read more »
Bones and Birds in Otranto
23/04/18 We left our lovely campsite to head a very short distance to Otranto, We had one of those starts where we just couldn’t settle. There is a lot of… Read more »
Golden Stone and a Long History
18/04/18 Lecce is a golden city, famed for it’s soft Lecce stone that has allowed master crafters to create ornate baroque masterpieces on all it’s glowing buildings. The stone is… Read more »
Finding Feral Trulli
13/04/18 – 15/04/18 The Valle d’Itria is a wide shallow depression that runs from north-west to south-east through the limestone heart of Puglia, roughly between the latitudes of Bari and… Read more »
Troglodyte Living in Matera
05/04/18 – 07/04/17 Matera; a city soon to be European Capital of Culture (poor Plovdiv is sharing the accolade in 2019 but seems likely to be overshadowed), famed for it’s… Read more »
A Brief Trip to Some More Greek Ruins
05/04/18 We left our sosta by the sea and headed along the comfortable main road – the SS106 – on our way to Matera. Following our trip to Paestum we… Read more »
Stuck on a Rock
29/03/18 Our next stop was Le Castella, known – strangely enough – for it’s castle that sits on a spur of land connected to the mainland by a narrow land… Read more »
A Small Town with a Big Cathederal
26/03/18 – 27/03/18 After being on the coast for a while we decided to head inland. The town of Gerace was chosen mostly because of it’s location rather than any… Read more »
The Disappearing Roads of Bruzzano
24/03/18 – 25/03/18 We had ended up here – near the village of Canalello and Ferruzzano station – unexpectedly so we had no plans and knew nothing about the area…. Read more »
Two Churches but no Ice Cream!
18/03/18 Visiting a famous monastery and church on a Sunday was probably not a good idea. Especially on a sunday leading up to Easter. Our poor excuse was that we… Read more »
A Serendipitous Stop
15/03/18 From Maratea we were unable to continue along the coast due to road closures. So we decided to head inland. We could see on the map that the road… Read more »
The Heavens Opened
14/03/18 The Basilicata coast has been compared to the Amalfi coast in our guide book. Is it comparable? We don’t know yet because our trip to the Amalfi coast was… Read more »
A Mystery Solved
09/03/18 We had spent the night parked outside the archaeological site of Velia-Elea (Velia – the Roman name, Elea the earlier Greek name), another Magna Graecia settlement. A brief walk… Read more »
Bent Wheels and Buffalo Butter
07/03/18 – 08/03/18 We drove down the road to Agropoli, the same road we had driven the day before in the other direction. A parking spot close to the coast… Read more »
Greek Temples in Paestum
05/03/18 – 06/03/18 When we got to Termoli we had decided to slow down and travel through Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria (roughly in that order) before heading north again. But… Read more »