The Italy filming was carried out by Val Vannet and David Rayner in Rome. We arrived in Rome to find that our hotel had been booked for July 2007 rather than July 2006 so the first task was to find somewhere to stay!

Once that was sorted out, we headed to the Vatican to start our first interview. Val found our first interviewee quite quickly but a few minutes into filming the first interview, the Vatican police arrived (in a golf cart - no siren or blue light) and chucked us out of the Vatican for filming without authorisation. We obviously looked too professional.

After that, it all seemed to go OK and over the 24 hours in Rome we managed to interview 14 people. Everyone was great and overall it proved to be a lot of fun. Although we were visiting Italy, many of the people we interviewed were tourists, so we talked to people from Brazil, Portugal, China, the USA and England as well as Italy. The four questions were:

• Is your local area happy or not? (Score 1 (unhappy) to 10 (very happy)) How would you improve the score? VIDEO 1
• Is your country a happy country? VIDEO 2
• Are some people more happy than others? VIDEO 3
• Where in the world is the happiest place? VIDEO 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy

http://www.big-italy-map.co.uk/

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/it.html

http://www.italiantourism.com/

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/europe/italy/