Living now in Istria, the tiny heart shaped peninsula, right up in the north of Croatia - bordering Slovenia, close to Trieste and across the Adriatic from Venice - we are very lucky that we can now travel to Italy very easily. Muggia is our closest Italian town, and...
Winter is a gorgeous time of year to visit Venice. I've only been once in the summer and it was crowded. And hot. Accommodation was much more expensive and I think I just found it all a bit of a faff. So, whenever we go now, we choose to go in the colder months. You...
Amanda and Steve, friends who come and visit us from Manchester, usually fly into Treviso, north of Venice, spend a couple of days there and then hop on the train to Trieste where we pick them up. They keep telling us that we must visit Treviso, because we’d love it....
Sometimes, you see somewhere online and you just have to go. No matter what. This happened recently when I discovered the website for the Hotel Grand Wiesler, in Graz, in the Styria region of southern Austria. When we lived in Manchester, the thought of seeing a hotel...
Not too long ago, when we still lived in Didsbury, we often thought about having time away in London, but never got round to it, because, well – London was just too far away from Manchester. The traffic would be awful. We’d end up sitting on the M6 or the M25. It was...
On our travels through Italy last year, we made the decision to explore the eastern coast of Sicily and having done some online research, decided that Ortigia (in the region of Syracuse), sounded like our kind of place. We took the car ferry from Reggio Calabria to...
Trapani (or Birgi Airport, located about 19 km south of the city) is accessible by Ryanair from the UK. Once in Trapani, the Egadi Islands – Favignana, Marettimo and Levanzo – to the west, are as easily accessible by ferry. We chose to spend six days on Favignana –...
In my book, a “cool” place to stay doesn’t need to be hip and trendy and cutting edge. It just needs to be somewhere that isn’t bog-standard. And this place we stumbled upon – quite literally – in Castellabate, Campania is very cool, if like us, you like things that...
Of all of the places we visited recently, Venice has to be one of the most memorable. We arrived on a cold, misty afternoon and were prepared for the weather to stay this way as we’d been under thick cloud all the way from Rimini. The lagoon, on either side of the...
Rimini – Hotel DuoMo… a pretty spectacular find of a hotel, right in the heart of Rimini. Surrounded by historical buildings and vaulted, arched walkways, sits the very striking Hotel DuoMo – almost brash compared to its neighbours, but somehow it fits. Bold, cherry...