An Italian Romance

After visiting my family in Germany we tacked on a few days for ourselves in Italy - we have been there together before maybe five or six years ago and it felt great to go back for a little bit more time in that wonderful country.

We traveled by sleeper train across the Alps and woke up to a hazy Italian landscape glowing in the early morning light, only a few kilometers away from Florence. We had been to Florence before, and so we just switched trains there to continue on to Pisa, which was a new place for both of us.

Pisa was only a short stop-over on our way to the real destination for this trip, but we did spend a few hours walking around, checking out the sights, and for a late, lazy, second breakfast in a small alley amongst an Italian crowd getting ready for the day. Here is a short audio piece I've recorded in the outdoors seating area of this caf in Pisa.

After another two hours on a local train we finally made it to Sestri Levante, which is a small beach town north of Cinque Terre, a national park renowned for its picturesque fishing villages that are hanging precariously on cliff sides above the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Here is a gallery of some of the photos we took in three days in the villages of the Cinque Terre, a few hours in Pisa and, at the end of our trip, half a day in Venice.

Through this all too short time, our hosts and everybody we met was fantastically friendly and welcoming. We couldn't have hoped for a better time in this sun-drenched country and our love affair with Italy has been renewed for another trip, hopefully very soon...