Our last full day in Italy was a Saturday. We woke up early to take a train to Alba, connecting in Cavallermaggiore. Early in the nearly two hour journey, I made the horrifying discovery that the bag of peanuts I had placed in my purse was infested with ants. I spent most of the train ride cleaning them out of my purse. The countryside through ( Read more... )

We spent Friday October 22 in Turin. It was a relief to have an unstructured day to walk around and enjoy the city. I found Turin to be very beautiful, in a different and less obvious way from our previous Italian destinations. Its streets are wide and grand, and many of the sidewalks are covered by large porticos, so you can window shop in the ( Read more... )

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Our guidebook contains no information on Turin or Piedmont, and I ran out of time before leaving to thoroughly research public transportation and locations. The result was, though Thursday was devoted to exploring the Slow Food movement’s biennial trade show, the Salone del Gusto, I had only a vague idea of where it was or how to get there. ( Read more... )

On our Naples day, I forgot to mention that we stopped in the Jesu Nuovo church and saw the museum full of Ex Voti: small plaques given as thanks for prayers answered. These Ex Voti honor Saint Moscati, a Christian doctor famous for helping the poor. A bomb casing that fell into the church in 1943 but caused very little damage hangs in the corner ( Read more... )

Our hotel in Venice, B&B Zaguri, pleasantly surprised me with its quality. It is very inexpensive for Venice, and it has a great central location. Since it only has three rooms, I expected a converted apartment with a minimum of amenities. Instead, our high ceiling-ed room was nicely decorated with quality furnishings, and the staff was efficient ( Read more... )

I thought we built lots of slack into our vacation schedule, but it still never felt like we had enough time. On Monday morning, we barely had time to eat breakfast and pack before the 11:00 checkout. We used the hotel's computer and internet for another hour, catching up on Facebook and looking at some of the pictures we'd taken, before taking the ( Read more... )

After again helping ourselves to the excellent hotel breakfast buffet, we rushed downhill to Marina Piccolo to catch the 11:10 ferry to Naples. The ferry sped across the Bay of Naples at 35 miles per hour, much faster than the one from Positano the day before. It was the clearest day so far, and we were treated to excellent views of Mount Vesuvius ( Read more... )

Saturday October 16 marked the halfway point of our vacation and another quiet morning. The breakfast buffet offered slightly different meats, cheeses and cakes from they day before, and we helped ourselves to generous servings ( Read more... )

After the stressful events of the previous night, Andy and I allowed ourselves to sleep in Friday. I panicked a bit when we woke up at 9:45, thinking we would miss breakfast ( Read more... )