Monaco, San Remo, Florence, Pisa

The sun has been beating down on us for our first few days of Italian vacation.  We are now on our second day in Rome, and had a full day of sights yesterday.  But today all public transport is on strike, and we don’t want to drive from our campsite into town, so but are taking it easy today hanging out by the campsite pool, planning to explore a few things around Rome by car, and have some time to update the blog!

Our journey began on Sunday after saying goodbye to our house in Marseillan.  First stop was Monaco, just for a quick look around.  It was quite a sight!  Money dripping everywhere, huge yachts in the harbour, everything sparkling, and extremely beautiful scenery.  We enjoyed the lifts down to the beach, and making fun of all the rich people on their boats.

We hadn’t planned where to sleep, but we were all getting tired around San Remo area so stopped.  San Remo was an interesting place, clearly seen better days, but with a huge old casino and a lot of big hotels.  The campsite, Villagio dei Fiori, there was the only one so far that hasn’t been really good.  We were camped on concrete next to a tennis court, but it did have a lovely swimming pool, which more than made up for it.

The road down the coast from San Remo was beautiful.  Andy counted more than 100 tunnels, and there were an equivalent number of bridges too. 

We got to the Cinque Terra around lunchtime, and spent the next few hours surrounded by beauty but a huge number of tourists too.  I expect it is really nice if you can get off the beaten track, but for us we were quite glad to just be passing through. On leaving Cinque Terra we drove on to Florence, and stumbled across a campsite just off the ring road.  It was only a quarter full and lovely, grassy terraced site overlooking the Certosa monastery, with a lovely swimming pool and bar, and just a city bus ride into the centre.

We spent one very full day in Florence, hitting all the sites: the Duomo, the Uffuzi gallery, Santa Maria Novella, Ponte Vecchio, and (the copy of ) the David, and some exploring of the streets.  It was a very very hot day, so our sightseeing was punctuated by lots of sitting in shade drinking water, and we were all quite exhausted by the end of the day.

Wednesday we went to Pisa and enjoyed the leaning tower and the Basilica.  There weren’t as many tourists there as I had expected, and even though the tower leaning isn’t a surprise, it is still impressive to see how far it leans – pretty amazing.

After Pisa we drove down to Rome and found a lovely campsite here in Rome, but I'll leave Rome for another post another day....