For our final ski trip of the season, we booked a package deal to Passo Tonale in Italy. It's been a while since we went for a package, and the 0630 flight did remind me one of the reasons why... But hey, it was a good price.
Early on in the week we received bad news from back home, which put a dampener on things somewhat. This led to more subdued evenings than normal, with not as much alcohol and probably better sleep because of it...
We stayed at Grand Hotel Paradiso, which is a little bit out of the main town,... continue reading »
As I may or may not have already mentioned, for the second half of our week in Italy we stayed in Sorrento. It's a convenient location for visiting Pompeii, and has the added benefit of not being Naples!
On our first evening we were treated to this rather stunning sunset:
There's not a huge amount to do in the town itself. Lots of nice places to eat and drink, even more shops selling limoncello and other lemon themed products, and travel companies selling day trips to Capri or tours of the Amalfi coast.
After four nights in Rome we headed south for the rest of the week.
Visiting Pompeii has been on my bucket list (not that really I have such a thing) for a while. But the more research I did, the more I kept seeing reports that Herculaneum is in many ways 'better', due to being smaller and a lot quieter than Pompeii.
We'd pencilled in two days to visit both sites and walk up to the top of Vesuvius. Herculaneum was first up. The excavated area is relatively small, but a lot more of the town is still buried deep under the... continue reading »
The Vatican City is very small, but does have several popular tourist attractions: the Sistine Chapel/Vatican museums and St Peter's Basilica. We only visited the latter, because I wanted to go all the way up to the top of the dome and enjoy the views.
Queuing to get into St Peter's was probably our longest queue of the week, at about 20 minutes. This was mostly just a bottleneck at the security scanners.
Top tip: if you carry a penknife in your handbag, leave it at your hotel. I can't possibly comment about whether... continue reading »
Three weeks ago I was on holiday in Italy. I have various excuses for why it's taking so long to sort my holiday photos out (illness, being busy doing important life things like finding a new job, etc etc) but you can probably mostly blame laziness.
We started off in Rome, where the sun was shining and it was 30° plus. Definitely gelato weather, yum.
We purchased Roma Passes, which covered all public transport, 2 free tourist attractions and discounts on many others. I think we probably got our money's worth out of it, and it was very convenient too.
