One of the wonderful things about Italy was the paper. Yes, for the bookbinder in me, this was a paper paradise. I have always enjoyed working with Italian papers and so you can imagine how excited I got when I saw several art stores that had sheet after sheet of wonderful styles.

Reds, greens, blues, flowers, scrolls, leaves, etc. I think I got a bit overwhelmed at one point and just had no idea what I wanted. Ha,ha…

In Lucca I found some wonderful papers and in Florence not only did I also find wonderful papers but I wandered into this amazing bookshop, Giulio Giannini e Filgio:

They had gorgeous marbled papers, lovely stationery that made you want to write long letters, and silky soft leather bound books.

Here’s my paper bounty from my travels:

Aren’t they gorgeous? I look forward to working with these for new creations. Now, I have to get going and start packing. We start our journey back home tomorrow and as always it’ll be super hard to say good-bye to Germany but we’ll be back.

Hope you’ve all been having a wonderful summer so far and I look forward to catching up with your blogs once I’ve settled back home.

We dined on some wonderful dishes, had lots of gelato and saw some amazing sights in Italy. I have stories to share but for now here are some pictures from the places we visited:

From our hotel view in Bolzano:

From the Torre delle Ore in Lucca:

Driving towards Volterra:

Enjoying a day in Volterra:

Florence:

We are now back in Germany for a few more days of fun. The weather here is cooler and rainy. I actually don’t mind that at all as I got too much sun in Italy and developed a bit of a heat rash, and I know that soon I’ll be back in hot Texas, so for now I welcome this weather.

More soon…

We are on the move and going down south. We spent a day in Ingolstadt yesterday. If you’ve read Frankenstein then you know Ingolstadt was the setting for the story. We didn’t see any strange creatures but we did find a great little cafe to enjoy some eisschokolade.

Now it’s time to hit the road again. Next destination is Bolzano, Italy and then Tuscany! Yes, I’m finally going to Italy, which has been one of my dream destinations for a very long time. So I doubt I’ll be able to post anymore but when we return to Germany I’ll share more pics.

Happy summer days and happy reading everyone!