When I began my Behind the Lines adventure (see the various previous posts for more) I realised to make sense of the journey I was to embark on, I was first going to have to do a hell of a lot of digging into the how my great uncle ended… Continue reading
The past weeks (and actually, months) have raced by like the pages of a flipbook. Taking my freelance status to heart, it means I’ve had my fingers in a variety of different pies, and have been able to explore a little of the Balkans – a part of Europe missing… Continue reading
Despite it being the middle of July, the weather was as dreary as when I had left the UK at the start of this journey in mid-September. A chill wind whipped across the waterfront at Calais, tearing at my hair and hastily-found jumper. The history of the town – British… Continue reading
Reaching the far north of Italy should be the end of my current journey. Fighting in Italy came to an end on 2nd May 1945, a week before the war in Europe finally ended on 8th May. My great uncle celebrated Victory in Europe Day with his Royal Engineer unit… Continue reading
Italy’s eastern border with modern-day Slovenia is not its only frontier to have shifted with time. The country, with its ancient and not-so-ancient empires, always seemed ageless to me, as fixed in boundaries as the island of Great Britain. This is not the case. The modern united Italian state, with… Continue reading
It was time to leave Venice, La Serenissima, the pick-pocketer in chief, the watery city on the edge of the world (or so it can seem) where it’s very easy to spend a lot of money without really realising it. For many, Venice is the end of a journey; journeys… Continue reading
I was really rather dreading my visit to Venice. It was partly 25 year old memories of a dirty, stinking city, and partly the hordes of tourists I expected to find there. If Florence was anything to go by – the queue for the entrance to the famed Duomo stretched… Continue reading
The trains don’t run to San Marino any longer, the world’s oldest and smallest republic, and even if they did my great uncle wouldn’t have needed to get there. Though worrying close to the action for much of 1944, and receiving a bombing that same year that destroyed its only… Continue reading
As I’ve travelled roughly north from Naples to Rome and then Rimini, via a number of smaller towns and cities I’ve noticed there always seems to be something happening in Italy. If it’s not the Republic Day celebrations in Rome, then there’s the Pope giving an open-air mass in Genova… Continue reading
I would say Benevento is a quintessential Italian town, except travel writers are banned from using the word ‘quintessential’ (along with ‘nestled’ and many other over-used phrases) and even after such a short amount of time in Italy I’ve yet to come across a town, village, piazza or street corner… Continue reading
