The beautiful city of Venice has 417 bridges, 350 gondolas, 177 canals, and a very scary train station. We arrived in Venice city late in the afternoon, there were no lakes or rivers. Turns out Venice is bigger than we thought. We got on the first bus we saw and asked them where the nearest place to stay was - a caravan park. We were in the middle of nowhere at a caravan park.

We woke to the sound of children outside our shoddy little caravan, it was a family park. We’d never left a place so quickly. We boarded a coach to take us into the Venice you would expect - the one we expected.

The Venice we arrived at was lovely. It looked exactly how it did in the pictures, even better than expected. We explored all the lakes and alleys and avenues. The little city was bigger than we thought so we settled into the Da Vinci Museum to be cooled down inside, but it was interesting so we stayed for about an hour.

We sat by the lake and shared a bowl of fresh Calamari between the three of us, I think we got a sunburn that day. There was a post office nearby where we spent the rest of our money on postcards to send back home, to let people know we were alive.

We missed the coach back, so we sunbathed by the river bank instead, a silver lining. The bus came back eventually but we’d lost our tickets and had to convince the driver to let us on, I don’t think he cared.

When we got back to the little family caravan park we stumbled upon a pool which was behind our room. We ate more Ice Cream than we probably should have, and my friend ordered a hot dog. We spent the rest of the evening by the pool, resting before a long journey.

We had to walk to the train station the next day, with nothing but a paper map. It took us 2 hours. I think more than anything, we were desperate to leave Italy behind in our memories. Beautiful, hot, historical, and dangerous Italy. If there’s anything I’ve learned from our trip around Italy, is that no amount of suncream can save you from an Italian August.