Hi all

Last time we wrote we were sitting at the church in Montepulciano using the monk's wifi...well, after bidding farewell to gorgeous Montepulciano and Tuscany, we headed for Umbria, and the town of Assisi we knew little about. Hmmmm bad move. While the town itself was very pretty, set on top of a hill and completely vehicle free in the historic centre, what we didn't know was that the town of Assisi is in fact a hugely important religious town, and thus the site of intense pilgrimage for a lot of people from all over the world.

We arrived on a Saturday and were completely overwhelmed by the amount of people in the tiny town, groups of hundreds of fully kitted out nuns, monks, priests, and just thousands of religious devotees infiltrating the town of Assisi, which we later found out, was of significance as it is the burial place of one of the patron saints, St Francis. While a very pretty city with some amazing churches, it was devoid of any real Italian life, as it was completely geared toward the religious pilgrims, with every shop a religious souvenir shop made up of crappy paraphernalia. It wasn't really for us, and we left Assisi after a couple of nights. (worth mentioning however, is the amazing basilica at St Maria de Angeli, just out of Assisi. by far the most stunning and awe inspiring church we have visited to date in Europe!)

We stopped off for a quick one night stay in another little hilltop Umbrian town, Urbino, on route to Venice, which was cute, and also had the best panna cotta consumed so far! Memorable definitely for that!

Next stop was Venice. After a slightly tricky time finding the carpark we were to leave our car, we headed 'across the bridge' and to our apartment that we were to call home for 4 nights. What a great time we had. Our apartment was fabulous and in a perfect location, on a canal (duh) in the Cannaregio district of Venice. We had the most perfect weather (seems to be the continuing story of our trip!) with high teens and perfect blue sky and sunshine every day. We did all the big ticket items (Rialto, St Marco Place, Rialto fish market, etc), as well as spending a day out at the smaller islands of Murano and Burano. Known for glass blowing, Murano was a real eye opener as we watched a 'grand master' glass blower do his thing. WOW! I'm still blown away (pardon the pun) by his skill - he made a prancing glass horse out of nothing more than a hot blob of glass in 30 seconds flat! No exaggeration, it was amazing. Burano was also gorgeous, its brightly colored houses stunning against the daily life of a tiny fishing villages.

We managed to fit in some shopping in Venice too, the elusive leather boots that I had been searching for since we arrived in Italy finally appeared! We also found some time to visit the oldest casino in the world, around since 1653 (or something like that), and quite generous to us which was nice!

We said goodbye to Venice after a lovely 4 days, and headed for the Dolomiti (The Dolomites), the Italian Alps. While it was possibly the most picturesque drive we have taken so far, it wasn't without it's stresses as we decided to take the scenic route rather than the motorway. As we were driving we started seeing mountains in the distance covered in snow...were we heading there? As the temperature started dropping quite rapidly and we realized we were ascending at a decent speed, we realized that yup, those ones in he distance were the mountains we were heading for! So after a couple of slightly scary hours driving very slowly and carefully avoiding ice and snow as we drove over mountain pass after mountain pass, (and regretting wearing our tshirts and 3/4 pants as it dropped to -2 degrees!), we arrived at our destination.

Ortisei was just a gorgeous little alpine town and we were staying in the most beautiful spot with a stunning view of the mountains. We spent our couple of days in the Dolomiti exploring the beautiful areas, with some of the most spectacular scenery we have seen in all of our trip. We headed up to the Alpe di Siusi area and spent a couple of hours walking through mountains that are only a couple of weeks away from being opened as ski runs, ice everywhere, and jagged mountains rising up from nowhere that just take your breath away. It was the most beautiful area, made even more beautiful by the perfect sunshine and blue sky that we had every day of our stay, freezing cold nevertheless!

We sadly left Ortisei yesterday, and with it we left the beautiful Schmalzl family and their gorgeous apartments. Just lovely people. Before leaving, however, we ensured we bought some much needed snow chains for the car- let's hope we don't have to use them, but it looks pretty likely that we will!

Our original plans of heading to Austria for a few days have been put on the back burner, as we found out that from November 1 you're not allowed to drive in any of Austria without snow tyres. Seeing we dont have snow tyres, it was continuing on through Italy for us! So we are now in Bellagio, Lake Como, for a few days, hopefully enough time to seek out George (Clooney)....!

Anyway, we will write again soon, most probably from Fed's house (also known as Switzerland)!

Love to all,
Xx