Dear Don,
I'll probably get slammed for being negative, but really BE CAREFUL ON THE ROADS. The first time I ever went to Italy I'd been there 45 minutes when I was rear-ended (on the motorcycle) and Frances was thrown over my head; the second time, a few years later, I took the Land Rover for obvious reasons. Two things stick in my memory. One is that if Frances had opened the car door a fraction of a second later in a car park, one car-width from the wall, she's have lost a leg to the idiot who shot between us and the wall at 40 mph. The other is that on a tour of maybe 3000 to 4000 miles though half a dozen or more countries, we saw five serious, possibly fatal accidents in Italy and none anywhere else (France, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Luxembourg).
Yes, we got lots of good pictures while Frances was recuperating in Aoste from the first accident. Just sit in any square, in any village, at a café table or even on a park bench, and you can get incredible people shots (not usually with LF, I'll grant you). And with LF you can shoot what I call the 'hand of man': hilltop villages, terraced walls, rag-cut slate roofs, dry-stone walls, all kinds of things where people have gently and sustainably modified the countryside for thousands of years. I find this much more attractive than what I call 'empty' or 'pseudo-wilderness' landscapes.
But on the road, BE CAREFUL. The Italians are the worst and most aggressive drivers I've found anywhere, including Greece, Mexico, Malta and even China.
Cheers,
R.