Italia

After a couple of lovely days in Florence we headed up to Milan, arriving at about 8 on Saturday night. We stayed in another rather posh hotel courtesy of lastminute.com's discounts and spent Sunday wandering among all the shops, seeing the Duomo (and climbing to the top) and searching for anywhere to eat – not much open on a Sunday. We ended up though with some really great take-away pizzas from a little pizzeria near our hotel.

We got to Venice about midday on Monday. What a city! It is so gorgeous and so surreal but the streets don't make any sense so we spent over an hour looking for our hostel and basically going in circles until a very nice women walked us over to the right street (which was actually only one street away anyway). Once we were free of our rucksacks we wandered over to Piazza San Marco (the most famous square in Venice) and treated ourselves to a Gondola ride because we decided we couldn't come to Venice and not. The gondola was great – definitely a highlight of our trip - and our gondolier told us plenty about where we were passing by.

Every corner of Venice is different and all of the views were fantastic. Today we walked over to a basilica on the point of the island and also checked out one of the main theatres which was very ornate and unlike any theatre I've ever been to before because, other than the stalls, the entire auditorium is made of boxes.

We arrived in Rome at 11.30 tonight and were met by Calum. Just getting ready for a good night's sleep. All pictures have now been uploaded, sorry for delay!