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Here's a conversation had today (Friday) while carrying all our luggage, walking the 2km to the train station in the pouring rain for our high-speed train trip from Florence to Venice, having missed both of the buses we'd tried to catch to the station (but which
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On Thursday we made it properly into the old city centre of Florence and to our planned museum from earlier — the Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum. We couldn't get a time slot for the museum till 5:15pm, so spent a few hours just wandering the city and
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Here you go... Day 43 • 17 Oct • Naples to Rome Half an hour in Rome Before Ben's pocket is picked. Our day’s in ruins. Day 44 • 18 Oct • Rome The Colosseum, Stone arches decayed by time, Is gargantuan. Day 45 • 19 Oct • Rome “Pizza by the cut”
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After visiting the Stibbert Museum, we had some belated birthday gelato for B. Both the museum and the gelato place were recommended in a blog post I found by a Florentine mum of three, and they made for an excellent day! One of the things I learnt from her blog
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On Wednesday, our second full day in Florence, we walked from our lovely apartment in the Le Cure district to the Stibbert Museum. This was right up the boys' alley! What was at the Stibbert Museum? J: Paintings, armour, interesting words (things that you read) and weapons and stuff.
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On Tuesday we had plans to head to a museum for our first day in Florence, but the boys were most keen to more closely inspect the river near our accommodation. We had seen a local "water rat" (castorino) on the way in on Monday night, and J
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On Monday, going from Rome to Florence, we got to ride one of Trenitalia's high-speed Frecciarossa trains. While these can apparently hit 300km/h, the highest we saw was 244km/h — still pretty cool, and a much faster (1 hour 20 minutes), more pleasant and cheaper way to
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On Monday (B's birthday!), we had a few hours to fill in between checking out of our AirBnb and needing to be at Roma Termini Station for the departure of our high-speed train to Florence. Our AirBnb host was kind enough to let us leave our luggage at
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On Sunday afternoon, we set off to explore Villa Borghese (a big park) and whatever else we saw along the way. We meandered along a somewhat grimy river's edge... Browsed in a Lego shop... And a rubber duck shop... Caught a glimpse of the famous Spanish Steps in
If you'd like to brighten his day with a message, he's contactable via his usual WhatsApp or email. (He also has his Australian number back, but won't receive SMS messages unless he knows they're coming and switches over to that eSim, so
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Today, Saturday, we needed some downtime after a busy/stressful time of late, so we relaxed in our AirBnb all day and then went out for dinner at a local pizzeria a short walk away. On one hand, it felt somewhat outrageous to "waste" one of our three
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The Colosseum is an Ancient Roman amphitheatre, built between 70 AD and 80 AD. It was used to entertain Roman civilians by getting animals or trained slaves, called gladiators, to fight each other (often to the death). Some gladiators even had their own fan clubs if they were popular enough.