Two weeks in Rome – part two.
I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been…
Tag Italian holidays
Two weeks in Rome – part one.
In January 2025, I spent two weeks on holiday in an apartment in the centre of the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) of Rome and I felt I had lived there for ever. It was like being at home, but with…
Ravenna: the mosaics – essential sites and sights to see.
The city of Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna on the Adriatic side of Northern Italy, is a civilised and quietly prosperous place, if it wasn’t for its most famous treasures, we wouldn’t guess that once, over a thousand years ago, the city…
Ravenna – Italy’s forgotten capital, a beautiful city of mosaics and poets.
The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest…
Tropea – taking it easy in Calabria
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…
Pompeii lives on after the destruction
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…
Back in Naples – weeks before Covid -soon we were all told to stay home.
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…
Milan – city of fashion, music and art, even in the rain.
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…
Going to Naples and Sorrento – on an Italian opera trail.
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…
On the Amalfi Coast
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…