A short distance from Colle di val d’Elsa is Monteriggioni. As with a few of the other places that I visited on this trip, I had not even heard of it when I woke up in the morning and, therefore, was pleasantly surprised with what I saw when I got there.

Monteriggioni is another one of Tuscany’s many pretty walled cities, this one smaller than most. You arrive on a steep, narrow path and enter underneath a tower. Inside you immediately find a large, mostly empty square. Around the periphery there are a number of parasols shading cafe tables and postcards and souvenirs spilling out of shop fronts.

When I first came to Colle di val d’Elsa I arrived on foot, having walked all the way from San Gimignano. This time it was easier, except for parking the car.

Colle di val d’Elsa is less famous than either San Gimignano or Siena but that’s not to say that it is without merit. It’s another attractive, small Tuscan town. This time made slightly less photogenic by the extensive maintenance work being performed on the main square.

One of the great things about this trip was that some days I’d just fall out of bed, flip open a map and decide where to go on a whim. My visit to Poppi was inspired by this process with a little coaxing from a book called “Most Beautiful Villages in Tuscany.” Such a title might lead to high expectations and the suspicion of imminent disappointment, but Poppi did not let me down. It’s a very pretty, compact town with a castle, a church and a long, cobbled main street. Even the weather was on my side.

Some things change while others stay the same. Siena was pretty much as I remembered it from my previous trip, although wetter this time. It’s still a very attractive city which somehow manages not to let the vast influx of tourists each year drive out its charm.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I drove to Siena directly from San Gimignano, taking a wrong turning, knocking the right side-mirror off the hire car and finally managing to squeeze into a very full car-park next to the football stadium.

I’m starting to learn that the problem with walled cities, as pretty as they are from a distance and on foot, is that parking can be a nightmare.

San Gimignano, in case you had not already guessed, is a walled city. I picked the parking lot the furthest from the route from the main road — quite sneaky I thought — only to find it already full and the path out almost blocked by a badly parked SUV.

Florence is both the capital of Italy’s Tuscany region and was very much as the centre of the Renaissance, which makes it fairly large and packed with treasures. As usual, I tended to stay outside rather than wander around galleries.

I found that the easiest way to get into town — not fancying the drive into the centre of a major Italian city — was to first go to Fiesole, park there and take the number seven bus straight into Florence. The bus goes practically straight past one of the major sites — the Duomo — so this is where I started.

Initially I thought that I was going to be staying in Fiesole for the entire trip. The description of the villa and some of the directions mentioned it explicitly so before flying out I made some effort to read up on the place. It turns out that it’s actually older than the now much larger city of Florence (Firenze). As such it has its own respectable church and some fairly extensive Etruscan ruins.

Head to continental Europe too early in the year and you’re likely to get rain. Or go too late and all the locals are on holiday and everywhere is overrun with other tourists. May seemed like a good compromise so we hired a big villa and all flew over to Tuscany.

In the end we got a bit of everything. Some rain, some sun; some areas with more English and German spoken than Italian, some parts where no-one spoke any foreign language; some good food and some really great food; and some fine wines and some fantastic.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Sky. My entry was taken a couple of years ago on a walking holiday in Tuscany. I used my EOS300 and Fuji Sensia 100 slide film.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Peaceful. This image was taken in Desenzano, Italy. It’s one of the first pictures I ever took on slide film, this time Fuji Velvia 50.