Systems. This is what I keep saying to myself, to Jill, to anyone who will listen. Systems are important, to me at least. I'm a reasonably organised person, I like to think and as far as travelling is concerned, the spirit of adventure that lives within me has to operate within carefully defined parameters.

These past two weeks in Italy have been some of the most eventful, enjoyable times of my life. And I'm so glad to be leaving, I can't wait to cross the border. I have had pretty much all I can take of craziness and barely concealed chaos to last a lifetime. I have no idea where it occurred to me, perhaps Positano on the Amalfi Coast, maybe even before that, but somewhere between Da Vinci and Berlusconi, the Italian people have seemingly given up their quest for systemic progress and have chosen instead to embrace the combined follies of past and present and just forge on ahead.

Don't get me wrong; there is a romance in chaos that appeals to the anarchic side of me, and I certainly wouldn't want to see the zest for life that the Italian people share snuffed out by ordered systems of a dystopian, Orwellian nature, but if a group of people could get together and plan a bus timetable that made any kind of sense whatsoever, I think Italy might just manage to come back and sit at the adults table again.

I hadn't realised until I sat at an Italian bus stop watching the early morning traffic that it's perfectly okay to drive down a one way street if you turn your engine off and just coast.

I didn't know that when two vehicles approach one another from opposite sides of a winding, single lane road making it's way between coastal towns, the most effective system for getting things moving is to get a civilian to jump off one of the buses and help direct the traffic. It's hard for me to comprehend that in the last 100 years, no-one has managed to propose a system for this particular problem that could bring the travel time for a 66km stretch of road down to under three hours?

The last couple of days in Venice have confirmed in my mind that the current scope of problem solving in Italy is not commensurate with the problems being faced. Venice is sinking. It's not a great surprise, you build an entire city on top of a series of small islands with stone and wood and brick, eventually things will settle, erode and shift. The first floor of most Venetian buildings are now uninhabitable. So, that's the rule. You're not allowed to live on the first floor. The process for renovating major historical buildings is clearly underway in and around St Mark's Square. I can only hope the real work is being done below street level or one of the most unique cities of the world is earmarked for the dustbin of history. The Venetian church that houses the tomb of Marco Polo has been closed for renovations for 20 years. Apparently, renovation work has stopped, with no deadline for completion.  I guess it just stopped being important?

In the same way it was once observed that you can't roller-skate in a buffalo herd, you also cannot drive a motor vehicle in central Florence. Many cities throughout the world have similar traffic problems; New York City for example. So the clever city planners designed an efficient subway, clearly marked street signs and a taxi service known the world over. Florence has none of these things. It does have a lot of signs that say "you can't park here" which are largely ignored by the general population.

I will never forget my time in Rome, in Florence, in the small towns of Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast and the Cinque Terre, the beguiling beauty of Venice, the food, the people, the art.

But my god, the systems.