In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I…
My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki. It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my…
This was in June 2022, my first foreign trip after Covid decided to keep us all home for a couple of years. I had been going on holiday to Italy annually for ten years. I love the place, the culture…
I spent a week in Naples in January 2020, and on a sunny winter’s day, I took the train to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius in AD…
On the 6th January 2020 I returned to Naples not realising it was going to be my last foreign journey anywhere for two years. On 31st January two Chinese tourists in Rome were tested positive for the Covid virus and…
In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its…
In September 2017, when I was looking at Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento, across the Bay of Naples, I thought of Pliny the Younger (born 61 AD), as you do, who wrote a detailed description of the catastrophic eruption of the…
I’m looking back at some of the photographs I have taken on my Italian holidays over recent years for blogs that I am only just getting down to now. In the summer of 2017, the year before I went to…
Nicola, or simply, Nic, was my effervescent driver and guide for a day trip from Polignano across southern Puglia in June 2018 and, as well as being fun, he was informative and good company. The idea was to head to…
I was based in Polignano in Puglia, South East Italy, for two weeks in June 2018, see previous blog, and, from there, I could travel to a number of other interesting Pugliese town and cities. Lecce – Baroque or not.…