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The journey by foot from our canal-side hotel back to 'car-park island' (Tronchetto) was probably not too long as the crow flies. But, the canals provide formidable obstacles. And our luggage was a tad heavy. We had various options, one being to hire a water taxi to take us from the hotel’s water-side terrace to Tronchetto. But you need to have deep pockets to hire one of those smart, shiny, wooden vessels. So, we opted for public transport, for which our 2-day travel passes

We had one more night before we needed to catch our ferry from Ancona to Igoumenitsa. We’d thought we would stay in Rimini, to have a look at Tiberius’s bridge. We’d found a hotel (from the Telegraph) that looked ok, but the whole area was uninspiring, so we found a rather-nice, low-rise hotel a few miles back north. I rang them. A very sweet receptionist said, yes, they had a room, and could she advise me that their restaurant was rated no. 1 on Tripadvisor!! So we booked a

We have arrived in our second Venice. The Venice. Magical Venice. Mercantile Venice. The capital of the Stato da Mar. Capital of the first European colonial power. The blue-print for the British Empire. The Serenissima. We have driven 1,200 miles from Cirencester. And nearly 1,100 miles from the ‘Venice of the North’ Bruges, coincidentally also a famous centre of lace production. So much of Missy Bear’s travels in the past few years have been influenced by Venice and its mari

I mentioned before that one of my university friends, Teresa, was working briefly in North Italy while we were there, and we’d arranged to meet up in Verona. Teresa and I were part of a group of six females in the same year, in the early 80s, reading Economics at Bath. We hooked-up early in our first year, and stayed friends all the way through. We even tried to share a house in our second year, but the landlady pulled it from the rental market over the summer. Apart from one

We’d originally planned to have a two-night stop before crossing the Alps, so that we could get some laundry done. But with the great weather conditions, and the chance to meet up with Teresa in Verona, we soon abandoned that idea. The drive along the Romantic Road twisted and turned so much that it took hours to reach anywhere near the end town of Füssen, and from where we would set off for the Brenner Pass. I’m not kidding – for two hours solid, we were only 1.5 hours from