Never did I think that when starting this blog ten months ago that it would have given me the opportunity to travel.

I was pretty set on having a year in England and then a week later I found myself on a plane to Italy after I was invited out to Biella and Turin on a whirlwind three-day trip. We managed to do so much in so little time, so much that I’ve decided to spread out the posts about the trip into three separate posts. One about Menabrea beer, a video I’ve been editing together of the trip and then this, a photo post.

This was my first trip out to Italy and I was pretty excited, even if that did mean waking up at 4am. I was amazed at how quick it took to get there, a little under an hour and a half. In that time I can’t get from Bournemouth to London.

For the first day we went and visited the town of Biella in Northern Italy. It’s a quiet town and one of things I thought was amazing in both Biella and Turin were the buildings. Even though they were quite old, each one had character to it, a shabby-chic east end London feel if I was to draw any comparison, with all the flats having their own little balcony. 

Our first stop was a visit to Menabrea beer factory which I’ll be writing about in much more detail in its own post. But to keep it short for now, the factory and the beer we got to taste was amazing.

We then went for lunch in a little Italian restaurant and then coffee. The espressos pretty much fuelled me all day on the Friday due to the little amount of sleep I had the day before. What I enjoyed about the Italian culture when it comes to eating is, rather than ordering your courses all at once, you order your courses separately, meaning it’s so much more relaxed. There’s nothing worse when eating out when you feel like the waiter is breathing down your neck. In the evening when we went out for dinner we arrived at half seven and didn’t leave until twelve.

For me, some of the best moments on the trip were when we were simply walking around and taking everything in. When getting a lift to the top of the town the views were great, even though it was quite cloudy. On a clear day we were told that normally you can see the Alps pretty much everywhere – one reason I want to head back! The town had so much more colour to it compared to English towns and villages.

The next morning we travelled into Turin and checked into our hotel. We pretty much dropped our bags off and left straightaway. Apparently it was one of the worst days for weather they had all year, yet I was in shorts and a short sleeve shirt. Turin had the typical city feel to it, without the painstaking rudeness of some Londoners. We headed to the centre to explore the food markets before lunch by the river that runs through Turin. We couldn’t of chosen better weather to go for lunch here as on the third day it decided to rain quite heavily. I had the steak with prosciutto ham and it was insanely good. I then swapped halfway with one of the other guys who had the prawns and again they were amazing. We ate so much food during our trip, but I don’t think any of us were complaining.

Our next stop after lunch was one of the more touristy attractions of Turin, the Mole Antonelliana, which gave us a great vantage point over the city. Again, we were

told that if it was clear we would’ve seen mountains, however I don’t think any of us were too bothered with the views we saw. I’ve always said that Milan and Venice were the two places I wanted to visit in Italy, but I’m so glad I was invited to Turin, somewhere I didn’t even consider going before this trip.

On the last day it was a case of it being a bit more chilled as we were flying in the afternoon, so we went to where they filmed the famous roof scene in the Italian Job and went to lunch at a pizzeria. One of the guys who came on the trip had judged at the world pizza championships and when he said that his pizza was ‘pretty good’ I knew we were having good pizza! I haven’t had pizza since being back as I know it’s just going to end in disappointment.

Admittedly I was quite nervous going on a last minute trip with a bunch of people I’d never met before as well as flying on my own, but I had a fantastic time in Italy with some great people and I’ve really got the bug to travel more. Thank you to Menabrea for inviting me out to Italy and seeing your town of Biella and Turin.

I look forward to sharing much more from this trip over the next few days! Have you visited Italy before?