Back at the end of June and beginning of July, my wife and I made a trip to Italy to hike in the Dolomites with some long time friends, and then we headed across the Adriatic Sea to Croatia to sightsee and enjoy some sun and water. My wife also has Croatian heritage (and a lot of Ukranian) so there was some cultural interest as well. Unfortunately since we were traveling without a car with backpacks, we were limited to buses and ferries as there are not trains in Croatia like most of western Europe. So we took ferries to get to most of the islands, and then you can usually find some bikes to rent to get around for the day.
We flew into Venice but pretty much immediately headed to the Dolomites and the resort ski town of Ortesei. After about 10 days in Italy we then spent 8 days in Croatia between the cities of Pula and Split. Then ended our trip back in Italy (mostly Venice area) for another 3 days. Its hard to filter photos from such a trip...so hopefully this is a reasonable amount.
Hiking in the Dolomites - this south Tyrol region in northeastern Italy is more like the Austrian alps and culture than Italy.
In a few places we had fixed ropes to help, but we never needed (nor did we bring) any climbing protection:
my wife and I - the Dolomites are a unique sub-structure of the Alps and very distinct due the the large platform carbonate (yes including dolomite) layers: