Winter is Coming, but it's ok.

Hello! Well it's been a busy old time since my last post back in June. It's always been more difficult to update the blog during the summer as my time is filled with running the Ischia Review website. Up until July things were much quieter than usual due to the ongoing restrictions in place to deal with the pandemic but then it all started to change for the better. 

At first it was just the Americans, Canadians and Japanese that were able to travel but most European countries followed soon after and eventually, UK citizens were also able to travel to Italy. Whilst it was all a long way short of what you'd expect from a typical summer, things really did start to pick up in September which felt as normal as any time since the pandemic started. As a very rough estimate, we probably saw around 50% of the pre-pandemic levels of traffic on the website, emails and general interest. 

This was all a far cry from summer 2020 where the numbers were closer to 5 or 10 percent at best. So we're now at another troublesome stage of the year which we've all become accustomed to: the winter. A time of year that's now synonymous with rising case numbers and all of the negative consequences that follow. However, I personally feel a great deal of optimism for 2022; I don't think the pandemic will suddenly just disappear but I think we'll more and more learn to deal with it and not let it stop us doing the things we want to do quite so much.

I really don't want to dwell too much on the pandemic though; yes it's important and the travel restrictions need to be kept up to date with, but the reason you're reading this in the first place is that you're interested in Italy. So, future blogs will of course keep up to date with any important travel information, but the main thrust will be to explore the country and all its beauty. 

For today I'm going to leave you with some photos of Gubbio in Umbria. I visited Gubbio for the second time this summer as I didn't really get a good chance to explore it the first time. Plus, I was able to get some much better photos this time as it was a beautiful, sunny day. 

I've been writing a great deal of new content on the website and with Gubbio I wanted to try and improve the reader's experience by making a few changes to the format. I'd be interested to hear what you all think of the slightly new layout. For example, I've included an itinerary, a more in-depth look at the places nearby and also tried to break up the text with more photo intervals. 

Aside from the Gubbio page, the website has seen an enormous amount of work this year: every single page has been improved in some way but there is a lot more to come on each one still. One of the major developments has been to create a page for every single ferry route originating from Italy and hopefully that will prove to be a useful tool for travellers for years to come. 

I would love to hear from you all with your thoughts about the year ahead, how things might pan out or what plans you may have for next year. So either drop me a line or add a comment to one of the social networking pages if that's where you're reading this from. Take care, a presto. 

Dion Protani

​Thursday 4 November 2021