Another thing I really enjoyed about my trip were the Italians themselves. Everywhere I went, they were so smiley and friendly. No one looked down on me for being a foreigner and they were so encouraging when I tried to speak the little Italian I know. I'm sure this isn't the case everywhere in Italy, but I had the same experience last time I was there as well and it's always a much-appreciated contrast to France.

Anyways, here are a few more shots of my trip.

Flying in over the mountains:I had about an hour in Torino before my train took me back to France. I had a rather large suitcase with me, so I couldn't really stray too far from the station, but I did take a quick spin around the block and luckily stumbled across a Grom shop:I also peeked through several courtyards and came across cute little images like this:
Another thing I have always loved is the colors - Bretagne was full of varying shades of gray (houses and sky alike), and Paris is also a fairly neutral-toned city, so I absolutely love the jewel tones you can find in the south of France and around Italy:Another nice surprise were the random flowers blooming everywhere throughout the countryside. All this nice weather has the plants confused and many are going into a second bloom....though this also includes a lot of the fruit trees, so who knows what kind of season they'll have next year...I'll end here with a random thing I came across with:
I saw this out of the corner of my eye when going up the mountain and was so curious that I actually backed that damn semi-automatic car back down a ways so I could take a closer look. At first, I was like WTF?? And then I noticed the little tufts of hair stuck to the tree and the light bulb kicked on. Duh.