Thank you for your replies. I was aware that Ryanair do not pay compensation or cover the cost of hotels etc but I didn't expect to be ditched in Italy with an alternative flight home 5 days later.As I mentioned I worked as cabin crew for 11 years travelling worldwide often positioning with other airlines and have never experienced such a situation so I didn't believe that this kind of thing happened. We were lucky in that we waited 12 hours at the airport on the off chance that we could get on the flight to Stansted standby which we did by the skin of our teeth. The other 398 pax weren't so lucky.