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.

• A humanist discussion of… ‘creationism’ – A nice rebuttal of some of the more common “arguments” against evolution.
• Classics in Lego – Famous photographs in Lego. Fantastic!
• A shaming victory on 42 days – The governments absurd law, allowing the Police to detail people for up to 42 days without charge, is not popular. Just hoping the Lords send it back with some rude comments attached.

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 found this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Movement,” much easier than some of the recent ones. As soon as I saw the title I knew that I had to use this image of a speeding rally car that I took last year in Corsica.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Tools.” I’m entry 150.

• French version of The Apprentice ’not allowed to fire contestants’ – Against my better judgement I got quite into this years (UK) Apprentice. The French version sounds even more entertaining…
• No ID Card Function Creep? Pull the Other One – “Now, tell me again why we should trust the UK government over ID cards?”
• Burma cyclone: Regime turns back US aid ships – The Burmese military junta puts their own position above the lives of over two million people. Sick.

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.

• US imposes 72 hour pre-reg for Visa waiver travellers – And this is going to help how?!
• ID Cards: Scandalous as Well as Idiotic – More on ID cards and the lengths that the government is going to in order to make sure that we all get them, like it or not. Very sneaky.
• Want to buy Jacqui Smith’s ID? – “Four people have been arrested after the BBC bought a driving licence and utility bills in the name of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.” Yet the government insists that this is a good reason for having a national ID card? They still don’t understand…