To Rome, with Love

Pure joy to read, this is without a doubt one of my favourite T. A Williams books of all time. It combines in the perfect ratio, a lot of the elements I love in a book in just one compact parcel.  Let's see well there is Italy, a cycling holiday, mouth watering food, romance, chocolate labradors, and some really good characters, which combined make To Rome, With Love a winner in my eyes. 

Sarah is the space of a couple of weeks goes from her wedding being called off a week before, by a note no less, to a week after when the wedding was going to be, in Italy leading a group  of tourists on a Venice to Rome cycling trip. She has guided holidays in the past and speaks fluent Italian, and not only that is a keen cycler. 

What could be good, or could turn out to be a disaster are her brand new bosses coming along on the trip too, brothers Miles and Paul hall, who are both gorgeous, but with quite different personalities. 

The group of people on the trip thankfully are all really good cyclers and have a great mix of personalities, and nationalities. Sometimes on group holidays you will just have arguments galore but this group seemed to get on and were all really supportive of each other. 

What brought this book alive though was the trip itself, with the descriptions of all the little towns and villages that Sarah and the group travel through and stop in on the way to Rome. I feel as though I know a lot more about that part of Italy now, and although I may have heard of some of the places featured, I had never known about others, but now have a good picture in my mind of them,. 

Miles was brilliant at providing additional information at some of the places, such as the history, or restaurant recommendations. Just about everything eaten by the cast of this book on this trip sounded delicious, and left me really hungry. There was seafood in more coastal towns, to a menu of assorted pasta dishes in Ravenna. 

If you are a fan of T.A. Williams you may by now have spotted that the majority of his books feature a chocolate labrador somewhere in them. Now obviously having a dog going along on an epic bike ride would not have been practical, instead there is a gorgeous pair of black labs featured, and they are very gentle and utterly adorable, and featured quite heavily while they were around! 

Given this was a holiday, as well a a charity  bike ride, it probably comes as no surprise that some new romantic attachments were formed between some of the characters, and they were all lovely to hear about. Nothing in huge details, but definitely some potential romances that may last past the end of the trip. 

From Venice, to Rome, this is many kilometres of pure pleasure to read, travelling alongside Sarah and her group, with T.A Williams trademark easy to read writing style and just all around good summery feeling emanating from this book.  However even this wonderful story couldn't change my mind about one thing....my preferred method personally of going from Venice to Rome, is still cruise ship, which is far more relaxing, and you can still get great scenery! 

Thank you so much to Netgalley and HQ Digital for this copy of the book which I reviewed honestly and voluntarily.