I read with great interest your holiday blog posts as I too took a short break with my family in Italy (but in a different region - north-west Tuscany). I recognise the problems of staying in touch - as rural and historic Italy is not well endowed with Internet connectivity.

I can also concur with many of the driving experiences; I had expected challenges, and I certainly had them, including:

1. Non existent road signs, signs that appear too late to warn you, and posts with a cornucopia of different direction signs, making it near impossible to pick out the one that you want in time.

2. Signs that tell you that you are on a road to some far flung destination, but tell you nothing about the nearer places that you are trying to reach.

3. Scooters everywhere - riders and passengers have very little protective gear (shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops - eeek), with very young passengers, and they overtake you with no warning at every opportunity, frequently on corners. They park where they like and clog up roads. They also stop where they like, even on pedestrian crossings, and this is no emergency - the ladies simply need to have a chat. (Yes I did see two scooters parked on a crossing with a long conversation underway).

4. You take your life in your hands on a pedestrian crossing, drivers rarely stop until you force them to. I nearly had a car rear end me because I stopped at a crossing to avoid hitting some workmen who were walking in front of me - and the driver of the car behind had the audacity to wave his fist at me - what did he want me to do - run them over?

5. Indicators are even more rarely used than in the UK, so you never know where anyone is going.

6. Speed limits are widely ignored, even when there are speed cameras, don't they work?.....maybe drivers don't see them as they going too fast and the cameras are well hidden and painted camouflage green.

7. Often drivers will appear to attach themselves to your rear bumper, they seem to prefer to intimidate you rather than overtake you.

8. The inner lane of the autostrade can be too slow with the speed limited lorries - but the outer lane is a dangerous place to be with the closing speed of the faster cars being quite scary. So one oscillates down the autostrade between slowed frustration and frightening high speed antics.

9. The A1 was incredible, traffic packed much tighter than in the UK and with some quite eye-popping manoeuvres such as cars swapping lanes with no prior indication and squeezing into gaps at speed that were only just big enough for the vehicle to fit.

10. Toll machines can be difficult to figure out at first, parking is a nightmare, and you have to be careful not to enter a ZTL - Zona Traffico Limitato - otherwise you will have your numberplate on camera and a fine arriving mysteriously some months later.

Having thought through the problems before arriving in Italy I succumbed to buying and using a SATNAV - which I have studiously avoided until now - viewing them as unnecessary technology. It was however a lifesaver in Italy, but far from perfect. It kept wanting to send me down spurious roads and got "angry" when I ignored it, from the airport it sent me into Pisa city centre when I wanted to get on the autostrade. It forgot to tell me to keep right or left when I needed to swap lanes, it proposed that I do a u-turn at a dangerous set of lights and even suggested the same impossible manoeuvre on the autostrade :-)

At one junction after leaving a toll booth, where there were multiple exits, including several ramps, it always gave me the wrong instructions and as a result I never found the "correct" route it wanted to send me on. The SATNAV thus resorted to the the ominous "re-calculating" when I failed again to figure out what it wanted me to do. Through multiple experiences I did eventually determine a way to minimise the "damage" it caused - by working out my own corrections after I had followed its initial erroneous instructions. Not quite the man-machine synergy that I had hoped for! Despite the problems - I would still recommend one for Italy. The SATNAV also "saved our bacon" at the start of the holiday, as the main road to the airport was closed by the police (accident presumably) and there were no diversion signs to get us back. A few B roads and a cross housing estate route got us back on track - but the SATNAV then blotted its copy book again by trying to send us into the airport via the goods entrance.

In terms of places we visited - we had mix of seaside towns, villages and hot Tuscan cities: Pisa, Lucca, Sarzana, Santa Margherita, Lerici, Portovenere, La Spezia etc. My daughter also insisted that we visit Maranello to see the Galleria for a certain make of car - honest it wasn't my idea.

Portofino was something else - a haunt of the rich and famous - we watched some very ostentatious boats/ships docking in the harbour and ogled at the high-fashion shops in the narrow streets (e.g. Gucci, Hermes). We were advised not to buy anything in Portofino (overinflated prices) but we eventually succumed to some expensive ice creams while waiting for the return ferry (don't drive there).

We stopped in hotels in Pisa for two days (start and finish) and the rest of the time in a converted flour mill in the Apennine mountains at a place called Corlaga. Here we had the opportunity to experience rural Italian life in contrast to the tourist version in places like Pisa. This included being woken by the church bell/clock across the road at 7:00 am every morning - not just by seven rings - they were just the start - but by about two minutes of constant ringing and followed by the same from neighbouring churches which were close by and annoyingly slightly out of synch. One of the other guests said that she had counted 96 rings.

We had some "fun" with the language, strange, stroppy, grumpy restaurant owners/staff (as well as some friendly and very helpful ones) but grew increasingly frustrated by the difficulties of avoiding pasta, pizza and other similar "bread-like" dishes.

The end our holiday was also somewhat fraught - the hotel plumbing broke and we were thus sent to another hotel before we even checked in, (and the replacement had no lift and we had to carry heavy cases to the third floor)... and then the next day the budget airline plane also broke and they had to send for a charter aircraft from London which was too small and led to a rugby-scrum like struggle to get seats, followed by a long wait on the runway with oven-like temperature and no air-con.

Still - I am not complaining - it was hot and sunny, it was interesting, different and eventful. When's the next holiday?

P.S. I also had to reacclimatise to UK driving, my journey home was similarly quicker than normal, and my patience with dithering UK drivers was somewhat shorter than it normally is. I even found myself wanting the Italian drivers back again - did I lose my mind while I was away?