Italy 2013: Our plans

We've been to Italy a couple of times before. Our first visit was experimental, a short stay that I'd booked without telling Radio and which she only found out about at the airport. The poor girl was trying to put on a brave face as I'd answered her question about what time we'd be going with an approximation and the only flight leaving at that exact time was to Knock, a town which Radio was already familiar with and had already told me she never wanted to visit again. I'd also given her a tip-off that our destination (Trieste) had something to do with James Joyce. Since he was Irish, this too was playing on Radio's mind. She's a good sport, though, and gamely handed over her boarding pass to the security staff without glimpsing at the destination.

That experimental four-day holiday went very well, and so we decided to venture back in September 2012 for a two-week stay, in which we crammed fifteen different towns into a fortnight. That holiday, I think, was the trigger for creating this blog, since we'd been too so many places and yet hadn't documented anything.

When 2013 rolled around and Clare was informed of her holiday dates (for where she works you don't request holiday but are told when you're taking it) we had to start picking venues. We had two two-week periods to fill and a single one-week stay.

Since the 2012 trip to Italy went so well we had little hesitation in choosing to do another two weeks there, and so we started planning it. The sensible approach that we always adopt is to consider the permutations for flights - we want to get a good deal regarding price but also have to factor in that we ideally need to use the same British airport for our departure and return so that we can use the car. A further level of complexity is that a cheap flight back to the original UK airport might indeed be possible from X, but if it cuts a couple of days off our holiday then it's in effect a punishment.

With these parameters in place we juggled about and determined that it was possible to use the entirety of our holiday period by leaving catching a 7am flight from London Stansted to Bologna on a Saturday morning and returning to that same airport at around midnight a couple of Sundays later flying from Pescara.

So, we knew our starting point (Bologna) and our end point (Pescara). All we had to do is fill in the blanks. With a little bit of patience and some Googling we soon plotted a route that will allow us to see all the major points of Emilia-Romagna, the region of Italy of which Bologna is the capital, in the first week, before we head off to the East coast to see the sea at Rimini and Pescara, take a trip to San Marino, and relocate for week two in the mountainous region Molise. We fully intend to be busy, especially in the first week, but by keeping the pace up we'll have marked off a further big chunk of Italy by the end of the fortnight.

Edit: I'm updating this entry after we've finished the holiday. The map below shows everywhere we went. The larger icons are places where we overnighted, whilst the smaller represent day trips. Hover over the icons to see the names of the places they represent. Some of the places are so close together that their icons overlap. You can zoom in to get a better look at them.