“We’re going to Italy!” we said. “OK,” our parents said. Not “No, you’re not, you’re fourteen years old,” – but we were. I was fourteen and my best friend Catherine was also fourteen and the plan we’d hatched was to fly to Italy, just the two of us, to join a raptor protection camp populated… More Two schoolchildren go unsupervised to Italy to spend a week with strangers

I may have given the impression in my previous two posts on my short trip to Rome that I don’t particularly care for the Eternal City. Is that true? Kind of. I’ve never really been interested in Rome. Italy doesn’t really work for, it’s too hot and I’ve never felt any desire to shunt it… More Rome – what I thought of the other places

I went to Rome specifically to see the Sistine Chapel and having accomplished that, I didn’t really have much interest in the rest of Rome. But the Colosseum was only two stops up from my villa on the metro, or half a dozen tram stops so I thought I’d pop up and see it. What… More The colossal Colosseum by rain and night

At the weekend, I went to Rome. I booked the flights on the morning of April 16th – that’s the morning after the Notre Dame fire, because that Monday evening I realised that those huge historic permanent monuments that are part of our very existence are not as permanent as I thought. The Sistine Chapel… More On the Ceiling: I went to the Sistine Chapel

Ok, it wasn’t quite solo but when you’re a 14-year-old girl flying to Italy, a travelling companion who is also a 14-year-old girl doesn’t count. Not only were we flying alone, we didn’t know the people who’d be meeting us at the other end. We weren’t 100% sure there would be anyone to meet us… More I went on my first solo adventure when I was 14