Italy

We were lucky to have great weather from Rome to Rome taking in the sights of Assisi, Siena, Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, Montepulciano, Rome beautiful destinations and incredible history. Both Nancy our tour guide who was knowledgeable and Luigi our bus driver they  were fantastic and worked great together. We had a different tour guide and driver from Naples to Taormina sights seen were great as well Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri then to Palermo, Monreale, Erica, Marsala, Agrigento, Armenian, Ragusa, Noto, Siracusa, Mt Etna not to forget the beautiful Taormina. We loved Sorrento full of life and Palermo great arancini and Sicilian canoli (was in heaven).

The standard of hotels and the level of guide expertise was excellent. The fact that breakfast and dinner were included in the pre-tour costs was of benefit to us. Our only concern would be the quality of the dinners presented to us during our 2 night stay in Alberobello. As the "dispersed hotel" did not have catering facilities, we ate at the same restaurant for 2 nights. This restaurant made little effort to give us meals comparable to the standard of the other included meals. On our first night the first course was a pasta with minimal sauce, the second course was 2 small Italian sausages with a small scoop of fried potato and the dessert was a chocolate sauce on ice-cream. Some of our group complained to Angela, our guide, who agreed that it was not satisfactory and rang the restaurant to ask for a higher quality meal the next night. On the second night, for the first course we were given a very similar pasta to the night before, then a small undressed tomato, mozzarella and lettuce salad accompanied by a small dressed tomato and lettuce salad. This was topped off by a slice of watermelon for dessert. We particularly enjoyed the final dinner at the 'Masseria le Stanzie' outside Lecce.

We were lucky to have such an amazing tour director- really the best of the 3 trips we had with Sun Island!