12. Italy - Rome and northern Italy

Day 63, June 15th.  Subiaco - Rome, Lazio, 19-33C, sunny

Our drive to Rome from Subiaco is enlivened by several things:

1.        It only takes an hour, and most of that is spent driving through delightful, forested mountain scenery.  Imagine driving into London from Reading, with the first 45 minutes of the journey being through forested, wild landscapes dotted with hilltop villages?  Hmm – no.

2.        Another pass through the amusingly named town of Arsoli.  Think it would take a few more trips for thar one to wear off.

3.        Watching two polizia cars drive into each other at a toll barrier on the outskirts of Rome.  The second car had evidently forgotten its toll card, so tried to tailgate the first one through the barrier.  This might have worked, if the lead car hadn’t inexplicably stopped after passing through the barrier, leading the second car to (a) drive into the back of it and (b) to destroy the now closing barrier.  Only in Italy…

We arrive in Rome in time for lunch; Jonathan and Martina greet us warmly outside their apartment, on a picturesque, oleander-lined street, no more than 700 metres from the Colosseum.  If they have any concerns about the amount of dirty laundry we haul into their apartment, they diplomatically don’t show it.

They’ve prepared a very welcome lunch of prosciutto and melon, followed by pasta and home-made pesto. Laurie thinks he’s arrived in heaven. Isabelle (six) gets over her initial shyness and after lunch, drags a rather confused – but willing – Laurie round their apartment to show him her toys, jabbering away in Italian.

Jonathan – a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in Rome – has kindly agreed to spend a couple of days showing us his some of his favourite spots in Rome.  It would be impossible to find a more highly qualified tour guide.

In the afternoon, he and Victoria (15) take us to visit a succession of beautiful and generally un-visited churches, starting with their local – San Silvestre Martine e Monte – plain from the outside but packed with a dazzling array of baroque gilt and royal blue frescoes and delicately painted friezes inside.  Underneath the church there is a half-excavated Roman domus, which we walk through, admiring arches, mosaics and paintings that had lain undiscovered for thousands of years, until the past decade.

Later, having visited the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, our tour coincides with Rome’s Gay Pride march – a seething mass of scantily clad, heavily chained and tattooed bodies, cheerfully drinking, dancing and grinding their way past Rome’s landmarks to a series of thumping dance tunes emanating from a procession of colourful, strobe-adorned floats, meandering their way through the streets. 

We stop for a while to watch, Jonathan chatting to some nearby ‘drag priests’ who’ve taken particular umbrage at the Pope’s recent comments about there being too much gayness in the clergy, while we hastily do a bit of catching up with the boy’s holistic sex education.  Don’t think they’ll cover this at Elstree just yet…

Then, having chuckled at the ironic juxtaposition of sparkly blue thongs, drag queens and nipple chains making their way past the Santa Maria Maggiore, we duck into the same church for some peace (and to admire a final piece of Catholic baroque overkill), before making our way back to the flat, via a much-needed ice cream stop.

Over an excellent supper of risotto, Jonathan answers a few of our questions about Italy that have been building up, including “Why are there fireworks every night?” – something we’ve heard (albeit never seen) in virtually every place we’ve stopped at in southern Italy, except the Tirino Valley.

The answer: “It’s to tell everyone the drugs have arrived”.  Mafia and local drug dealers use firecrackers to announce the arrival of each new shipment, enabling local distributors and users alike to show up at pre-appointed RV points.  Terribly efficient.

Day 64, June 16th.  Rome, 24-36C, sunny

After most welcome fried eggs and bacon, we set off with Jonathan and Victoria in the truck, for today’s tour.  First stop: dropping Victoria at a friend’s exhibition; then we park up at the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, a great, white marbled, triple arched fountain which provides an excellent view of the city below us.

Just below the fountain and hidden behind the Spanish Royal Academy, we find the tiny, circular-domed beauty of the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio, which is today being used by a modelling agency for a mock wedding photo shoot, enabling Laurie to score some particularly theatrical arty photos.

Onwards, we cross the Tiber and park the car near the Galleria Spada, where we admire the mischievous brilliance of Borromini’s Perspective Corridor – a slanting, arched tunnel with a 31-inch statue at the end of it, which gives the appearance of being about 30 metres away, when in fact it’s a mere eight and a half.  It’s splendid – and emblematic of the wealth and artistic ambition of the Renaissance city – that such things could be designed, funded and built in 1653, just for the fun of it.

We visit many churches and see many examples of ‘Baroque overkill’ – not least, the side chapel of the San Giolamo della Carita church – every millimetre carved and dripping with gilt or ornate paintwork.

There’s only so much of this anyone can take, and after a quick lunch of surprisingly good sandwiches and pizza slices in a backstreet, we let the boys (and ourselves) loose on the Leonardo da Vinci museum – one of those rare, wondrous museums where you can touch and play with everything – much to the boys’ delight.  Ralph and Laurie (and us, to be fair) spend a happy hour and a half testing and playing with beautifully crafted recreations of da Vinci’s many creations – from lifting apparatus, printing machines, flying machines and underwater diving creations.

Our final stop today is meant to be the Pantheon – something we’d visited before but which Ralph is particularly keen to re-visit, given his fascination with the huge, freestanding domed structure of the building.  Here – for the first time today – we really hit the crowds.  Even with Jonathan’s magic knowledge of fast-track entry ruses, it’s clear that we’re in for some lengthy queuing, so we abandon it and go for an cooling ice-cream instead, before heading back to the car and driving home.

Day 65, June 17th.  Rome, 24-36C, sunny

It’s Monday today; we’re booked into a local garage to try to sort out a few lingering issues with the truck (persistent albeit occasional over-heating, lack of working windscreen wipers etc…), plus a weekly school Teams call for Ralph, but all that is thrown in the air when Jonathan and I walk down to the truck after breakfast and find it’s been broken into. 

A neat hole in the fixed rear window in Laurie’s door belies a far greater mess inside – but luckily, it appears to have been a rushed job.  They’ve nicked our awning tent, Nina and my clothes box, and the boy’s school-work box.  Luckily, despite trying to get into the boot and knackering the boot lock in the process, they didn’t get into the main boot area and steal any of the boys’ stuff, or our main camping equipment – and neither (as sagely pointed out by Ralph) – did they find the ‘unlock all doors button’ on the driver’s door, which would have given them full access to everything…

Nina’s coat is lying discarded under a nearby car – it looks like they left in a hurry.  Getting over the initial shock and irritation, Nina, Jonathan and I do a sweep of the nearby park and surrounding streets, hoping and expecting to find some of our possessions – at least the boys’ school box – discarded once the thieves had realised they were (a) heavy and (b) worthless to them.  No luck – they were evidently bundled into a car and driven away; they’re probably at the bottom of a river or motorway cutting by now. 

Intensely irritating – and a reminder that in any big city, if we’re not parked in secure or monitored parking, we are vulnerable.  Luckily, we’d bought so much stuff inside for washing and/or for the boys schooling.  It could have been so much worse.

The boys are angry and upset when we tell them – but they are cheered up somewhat when we discuss how angry the thieves would have been when they discovered they’d nicked a load of maths, science and Latin textbooks, Sellotape and pads of paper…

Jonathan and I try to make a report with either the polizia or the carabinieri, but both are too busy – it appears there were over a hundred similar break-ins in Rome last night.  So we drop the car at the garage, with a longer list of things to fix now – and try to make the best of what will inevitably become another night’s stay in Rome.

Nina and I pay a visit to local clothes shop to replenish our underwear supplies – again, we console ourselves imagining the local criminal underworld bosses exploding with anger at their haul of rather ancient underwear.  Disappointingly, while Rome is very much a place to (a) buy clothes and (b) improve our overall style (not hard), it’s neither the time nor the place to fully replenish our wardrobe with stylish Italian outfits… we still have 10 weeks of camping to do, after all.

Later, we take the boys to the nearby park with their (thankfully un-stolen) painting books and sets, to paint the Colosseum, with varying degrees of success. Jonathan and I finally make a successful visit to the polizia to file a report and get a crime certificate.  The young police officer who sees us nonchalantly hands us a pre-printed form, in Italian and English, and asks us to fill it in.  There’s an honest and complete lack of pretence about trying to recover our belongings – or trying to find the perpetrators.  A photocopy of our completed form – with a rather smudged police stamp over the top of it – is all we get.

We’d taken Jonathan, Martina and Victoria out to supper last night as a thank you, on what was meant to be our last night’s stay.  Tonight, Martina – a celebrated and published academic, as well as a diligent hostess – prepares more prosciutto and melon for starters, and home-made pizzas for everyone. 

Whilst she’s preparing supper with her indefatigable mother who is also staying with them, we’re treating to renditions of Debussy, Chopin and Beethoven by Victoria and Jonathan.  Both are classically trained; Victoria is already a conservatoire level pianist.  Deeply civilised.  Luckily, Laurie remembers we have an audio clip of him and Ralph jamming on their electric guitar and drums at home – so we can demonstrate that we’re not complete philistines (although by comparison, we are).

Day 66, June 18th.  Rome – Lake Bolsena, Umbria, 24-36C, sunny

We get word that the garage should have the car ready by around lunchtime (‘lunchtime’ comes with a margin of error of +/- 3 hours in Rome), so we endeavour to make the most of what should be our final morning here.  Poor Jonathan and family are trying their best to pack up before they leave Rome for six weeks for the summer tomorrow; we’re conscious we should try to make some effort to keep out of their hair.

A second stab at the Pantheon proves fruitful; Jonathan’s queue-beating tip comes up trumps and we walk straight in having bought our tickets, avoiding a queue that seems to snake halfway to the Piazza Navona. We also manage to replace our recently nicked Balkans guidebook, another of the effectively valueless but important items we’ve been dispossessed of recently.

We eat in ‘Ginger’, an old favourite of ours from a previous trip, then head back to the apartment.  Nina and the boys pack up our belongings, which we have successfully strewn through every single room (including Bazy, who’s taken up temporary residence in the kitchen sink).  

I go and collect the truck, once they finally deign to open after a long (normal in Roman terms) lunch.  It’s a hundred euros: thermostat removed to mitigate the overheating, wipers fixed, and the shittest piece of second-hand plastic I’ve ever seen wedged into the hole where Laurie’s fixed rear window used to be.  Even by Italian standards, it’s a bodge job – we’ll have to get it properly replaced soon.

We say our sincerely heartfelt goodbyes and thankyous to Jonathan, Martina, Victoria and Isabelle, and leave them – finally – to their packing.

We drive north, stopping at an Italian equivalent of Autoglass on the outskirts.  Unsurprisingly, the glass is an ‘order-in’ job with a long lead time; in the end, we order the glass online, scheduling it to meet us at their workshop in Treviso in a week’s time.  Probably the best we can hope for, and it means we’ll have to take our time through northern Italy – which is no hardship…

We reach the black-sanded purity of Lake Bolsena in late afternoon – the largest volcanic lake in Europe.  We set up camp and immediately take ourselves for a swim in the crystal-clear waters of this former volcanic crater – it’s chilly, but not as chilly we’d expected, given its 81-metre average depth. 

Supper tonight consists of prosciutto and fresh melon, followed by excellent fresh pasta.  We thank Martina for (a) reminding us of such a great starter, (b) insisting we should be picky with our melon choices and (c) instructing us we should always insist that our prosciutto be ‘affettato molto sottile’ (sliced very thinly).  Nina’s behaving like a native when she’s shopping now.

Day 67, June 19th.  Lake Bolsena – Lake Trasimeno, Umbria, 24-35C, sunny, humid, overcast

Lake Bolsena looks like a perfect spot for paddle boarding.  So after breakfast, in my finest Italian, I ask at our campsite reception if we can hire paddleboards for a couple of hours.  They don’t have any, but direct us to a café a kilometre or so round the lake shore.

Repeating my finest Italian, the lady behind the counter confirms they have four, and I hand over 20 euros.  She shuts the bar and gestures me to follow her to get them; this has all the appearances of being a faff-free equipment hire – no forms, no safety briefing, no deposits – we could be on to a real winner here.

Sadly not.  We walk to the end of the car park and she starts hauling out four sun loungers for us.  They don’t have any paddleboards.  She refunds my 20 euros.  My Italian requires further improvement.

Onwards to Orvieto, following Jonathan’s suggestion to head north through Umbria and Marche, and to avoid ‘Chianti-shire’ (i.e. Tuscany).  Orvieto – another quintessentially ancient Italian town perched on top of a hill – is worth visiting for its extraordinary cathedral alone – a vast, striped affair with a magnificent Gothic façade.  Started in 1290, it took over 300 years to build – yet another monument to the Catholic church’s mind-blowingly immense wealth and power in Europe.  Whatever else one might say about the current legacy of the Catholic church, its gifts of architecture are undisputed.

After an expensive lunch (Orvieto very much part of the American tourist trail), we head north to Lake Trasimeno, driving through Umbrian scenery which would be prettier if it wasn’t for the dense, leaden cloud that’s filled the sky.  If the temperature wasn’t 35C and we weren’t all soaked by the humidity, it could look like England…

Trasimeno, compared to Bolsena, is disappointingly green and murky, and slightly stinky.  We find a campsite (no garden sharing options round here), enjoy more local prosciutto (with chickpea surprise for main course tonight!) and a few cooling beers, and head to bed.  Very sweaty and humid – takes a long time to go to sleep. 

Around 10pm, a deep murmur – somewhere between whistling and vibration – starts to emerge all around and across the lake.  It’s the noise of billions of little insects, waking up and starting their nightly activities.  We double check our mosquito net is tightly zipped.

Day 68, June 20th.  Lake Trasimeno, Umbria, 26-35C, humid, overcast

Lots of activities planned today, so we knock up scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast.  It’s always a popular breakfast, but the washing up afterwards makes it a labour of love when camping.

First up – paddleboarding.  We’ve now learned the correct Italian word for a paddle board – basically just the abbreviation of Stand Up Paddleboard, pronounced ‘soop’ – and finally get what we’re after. 

The lake, though, isn’t quite what we’re after.  It’s still green, murky and a little stinky, with a disconcerting number of dead fish floating about.  Notwithstanding that, local fishermen are still dotted around the marshy, reeded banks, trying their luck.  It doesn’t look polluted, and it’s very warm… but not appealing for swimming. 

Back at our campsite reception, we enquire about the ‘molti pesci morti’.  Once again, climate change is cited as the culprit.  Only two little streams flow into Trasimeno, and none flow out.  The winter rains haven’t arrived for the last two years, meaning the water level is about ten feet lower than usual, and the lake is very short on oxygen.  There doesn’t appear to be an immediate solution in the offing, despite talk of building a relief river from Tuscany… the immediate outlook for this once teeming lake doesn’t sound encouraging.

Next, we’ve hired bicycles, in an attempt to cycle round the lake.  We’re trying to rebalance the books between culture and action today.  As it turns out, we’ve massively underestimated the size of the lake and make it about a quarter of the way round, clocking up 16km, before we decide to cut our losses and turn around, realising it’ll be dark before we get back to the car otherwise.  Plus, it's 35C and full humidity again, and the children are baked and poached – needing regular dowsings of cold water over their heads and down their T-shirts to keep them going. 

Luckily our campsite has a pool, allowing a much-needed cooling off when we return.  Our children have an innate ability to be rejuvenated by water; having been dead on their feet getting back to the campsite, they’re soon back to full volume – much to the chagrin of the assembled middle-aged Italians, lounging by the poolside.  We attempt to instil some lessons on self-awareness, with limited success.

Tonight, having not moved for a day, our fridge is a little low on supplies.  Nonetheless, we find an aubergine to fry and a red pepper to roast on the grill, alongside a tin of tomatoes, another tin of chickpeas (where did they all come from?  We haven’t bought any since leaving the UK…), lots of garlic and some random dried salami languishing in the bottom of the fridge – it works out surprisingly well.

Another hot night, attempting to go to sleep, listening to the billions of hungry insects outside, trying to get in.

Day 69, June 21st.  Lake Trasimeno – nr Monte Santa Maria, Umbria / Marche, 27-36C, humid, overcast

A bit of car work required this morning.  The front right tyre, fixed for ten euros in Albarobello, isn’t really fixed, and is rather flat again. 

We borrow the campsite’s compressor to fill it up; (a) for speed and (b) since our compressor requires the engine to be running, and since leaving Algeria our exhaust has taken to spewing out embarrassingly antisocial amounts of black smoke when the engine is idling; not the done thing in a campsite.

After a few false starts, we find a garage in Trasimeno which can accommodate us and look at the tyre.  We explain where we got it last fixed; the boss explains vehemently that all southerners are idle, feckless and incompetent, and you have to watch over them like a hawk to get a job done properly.  At this precise moment, we don’t have sufficient evidence to disagree.

Fifteen euros later and another new valve, and we’re on the way again.  We buy provisions for camping tonight in a little shop on the outskirts of Trasimeno.  The lady kindly serves us, then shuts and locks the door as we leave.  It’s 1pm; nothing opens round here again until 4.30pm. 

We have lunch in the deserted town square, in an eatery which is itself deserted, save for a chain-smoking Northern Irish lady and her two children, and a sizeable, heavily tattooed American couple – an incongruous mix.

This afternoon’s Umbrian UNESCO city of choice for our culture stop is Gubbio – a warm, stone-grey medieval town, nestled at the foot of Mount Ingino. Today, set against the overcast skies, it’s monochromatic.  As we sweat our way up through its pretty cobbled streets, we don’t feel like we’re seeing it – or Umbria – at its best.  But we plough on, Ralph intent on visiting the Palazzo dei Consoli and Laurie intent on photographing every archway and oleander framed view he can find.

Heading north again and away from Umbria, Nina gets on the phone to some campsites – options are limited in the rural part of Marche where we’re headed.  In her best Italian, she ascertains that the first one is full with a school trip, whilst the second one is closed.  Luckily, the third option – a Dutch owned and run campsite called Podre sei Poostre – is open, and has space for us.  

We make all haste – or as much haste as is possible – through Marche’s narrow, steep and very windy lanes, climbing and traversing our way through rolling, bucolic landscape, brimming with sunflowers, wheat and vines. Gosh it’s beautiful here.

We barely see a soul, or a car, on our way to the campsite.  But on arrival, it feels like we’ve turned up in Holland.  There must be over a hundred Dutch camper vans or caravans here, parked in rows up and down the steep slopes of the campsite.  In fairness, the campsite is probably hillier than the entirety of Holland. But it’s beautiful, spaced out, and has an excellent pool and bar – and the Dutch are always good company. Judging by the distant noise from the bar this evening, there must be some football game going on.  Judging by the cheering later on, it sounds like the Dutch were successful.

We swim, then prepare prosciutto and melon, followed by tagliatelle with aubergines, sun-dried tomatoes and pecorino – a delicious supper.  Exhausted by the relentless humidity, we’re in bed early.

Day 70, June 22nd.  nr Monte Santa Maria – San Marino, Marche / San Marino, 24-33C, sunny

At last – blue skies again this morning.  Most welcome after the leaden skies and unyielding mugginess of the past four days.  We find it rather hard to leave this idyllic Dutch campsite, but after a morning of home schooling, walking and swimming, we finally drag ourselves away just after midday.

It’s Saturday today; learning lessons from previous Sundays, we find a Conad supermarket in a town on the coastal plain, and stock up with two days’ worth of supplies.

We’re heading to San Marino today; it’s on the way and it feels almost rude not to visit, and tick off another of Europe’s strange little micro-states.

And what a strange little micro-state it is.  As we approach, the tried and tested Italian system of using roundabouts is abandoned in favour of US-style, traffic-lit intersections, meaning the traffic is immediately heavier, and worse. 

As we approach the centre and the ancient city, we start to climb up a series of hairpin bends, through concrete-heavy suburban sprawl.  We park near the cable car station – which is mercifully free of any Gibraltar-style queues – and make our way to the top.

For sure, the ancient, hilltop city of San Marino occupies a spectacular spot, perched precariously on top of Monte Titano.  From the top, the views – east towards the coast, and west inland towards the Apennine mountains, are mesmerising.  The streets of the old city are immaculately maintained, and spotless.  It’s three vertiginous stone watchtowers are photogenic and beguiling. 

But that’s where it ends.  San Marino – one of the world’s oldest republics – has adopted a zero-VAT policy which has, in effect, turned the entire old city into a duty-free shop, with every street lined with shops selling nothing but perfume, jewellery, handbags, knives, guns, sweets, plastic gimcrack, knock-off Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings figurines and all manner of other junk. 

Any form of authenticity, or any non-tourist related activity, has long disappeared from this ancient bastion of liberality and democracy.  But perhaps we’re expecting too much?  We shuffle guiltily through, feeling like we’re part of the problem.

We descend in the cable car, re-unite ourselves with our truck (safely parked, with Laurie’s broken window jammed up against the side of a cliff) and find our campsite – one of only two in San Marino. 

We can confirm that the ‘Centro Vacanze’ is not a place to visit or return to, unless you have a predilection for rules, super-crowded swimming pools, and awful tribute bands destroying reams of 70’s and 80’s classics at full volume until nearly midnight.

San Marino?  Tick.  Return journey planned?  Nope.

Day 71, June 23rd.  San Marino – nr Chioggia, Veneto, 28-33C, overcast, humid, rain showers

To add to last night’s frankly miserable night’s sleep, it is now raining.  We manage to squeeze in a few hours’ focussed home schooling (making up for some rather less than satisfactory efforts recently) before packing up during a break in the rain and heading north to the Po River delta.

On the face of it, there’s precious little to recommend the Po delta. 13,000 square kilometres of flat, marshy, mosquito infested wetlands, especially in the current hot and humid conditions, doesn’t sound appealing.  There’s already muttering in the car about B&B or apartment options for tonight, to avoid being munched alive in some insect-ridden campsite.

As it happens, the birdlife makes up for the inconveniences listed above.  As we drive along mile after mile of flat, straight roads, looking out at paddy fields, vineyards, water, and marshes, Laurie hangs out of the window with the zoom lens on the camera, taking photos of flamingos, herons, egrets, cormorants and some big-beaked wonder that we’ve yet to be able to identify.

We even manage a little culture to keep Ralph happy – stopping at the delicate, eight storey campanile of the Abbey Pomposa – a delightful piece of brickwork which is easily the tallest building, or thing, in the vicinity.

In the end, we find a campsite near Chioggia, on the banks of the River Brenta, one of the Po’s many deltas.  With the truck’s rear window still an insecure concoction of third-hand Perspex and our duct tape (the addition of duct tape has significantly reduced motorway noise and probably doubled its security rating), we don’t feel comfortable parking in a town or city, where we can’t guarantee secure parking.  Watery Chioggia – a mini-Venice – certainly isn’t able to offer that.

In my finest Italian, I ask the campsite owner if they are playing any music tonight.  In his most deadpan Italian, I understand his reply to be “No, we’re not playing any loud music tonight. It’s Sunday and all the loud music happens on a Saturday”. 

As it transpires, what he actually said was more like “No, we’re not playing any loud music tonight, we played ours last night.  But the massive club over the river plays thumping dance music until midnight every Sunday”.

The music doesn’t start until we’ve set up camp and started cooking – by which time we’re unfortunately committed to our location. 

The Ibiza tune set, coupled with some techno’d up 80’s cheese, is actually pretty good – but (a) it’s so loud that there’s no chance that anyone except Ralph (who could sleep on a bench in a Bengali train station) can get to sleep, and (b) it’s the other side of the river so Nina and I can’t even employ the ‘if you can’t beat’em, join’em’tactic. 

At midnight, the music stops, and the wind starts.  Suffice to say it’s not a vintage night’s sleep.

Day 72, June 24th.  nr Chioggia - Treviso, Veneto, 22-32C, overcast, humid, rain showers

We wake to the rain, which sounds like it’s hammering down on the roof tent.  We wonder why it couldn’t have started at 10pm last night – it would have dampened the music. In fact, the tent always makes it sound worse, but it’s still very wet. We don’t dally: without bothering for breakfast, we pack up the tent, get everything in the car and make our way, in determined silence, to Chioggia for coffee and breakfast.

Chioggia is one of those places that makes one question mass tourism.  It’s a working fishing port, it boasts canals, stone and marble bridges, colourful streets, Renaissance cathedrals, piazzas bustling with friendly locals, abundant fruit, vegetable and fish markets, and one of the world’s oldest working clocks, housed inside the imposing Torre di Sant’Andrea.

But it probably receives less than 50,000 visitors per year.  During our morning meanderings in the drizzle, we don’t see another tourist.  Last year, Venice – just 30km north – received over 20 million.  If ever there was a perfect emblem for the benefits of avoiding the selfie-snapping, Insta-posing, smash-and-grab tourism machine which has now engulfed Venice’s 50,000 or so embattled inhabitants, Chioggia is it. 

Despite the drizzle, we love the place and its authenticity.  Unfortunately, over coffee we get a text from GlassDrive in Treviso, telling us the car’s glass won’t be ready to fit until tomorrow.  Our plans of reaching Treviso in time for a 2pm fitting and then heading towards Slovenia now have to change.  Over a group discussion, we elect to (temporarily) become part of the mass tourism problem and become some of those dreadful people who make a day trip to Venice.  It is – we reason – on the doorstep, and a good opportunity for the boys to see some of Europe’s finest architecture.  Plus, it’s still pouring with rain, so it might be quieter than usual.

We drive north, across the choppy, grey Venetian lagoon, wondering why people choose to live in the houses that occupy the swampy marshland on the occasional islands in the middle.  We cross the final bridge of the lagoon to Venice itself and park up in one of its myriad concrete carparks (‘tourist processing centres’) and make our way on to a water bus to the centre, having paid one euro each to use a not particularly clean loo in the car park.

If it is quieter than usual, it must be utter purgatory in the peak summer season.  Sure, the back streets and the narrow waterways are beguiling despite the drizzle, but in the busier squares and streets, we hang on to the children for fear of losing them in the crowds.  The architectural splendour of Piazza San Marco is completely cancelled out by the competing tour groups, jostling for the best photo spots. 

Nina expertly guides us through the throng and we board a boat to the island of Murano.  We’ve booked a tour and demonstration at a glass blowing factory; the boys (as are we) are perpetually fascinated by seeing how things are made, and it seems a great use of our time. 

Indeed it is.  Ralph and Laurie watch in awe, as a master glass blower effortlessly produces a vase, then sculpts a rearing horse from a piece of molten glass, all the while spinning the work slowly on the end of his blowers’ rod so it doesn’t sag.  Each piece must be finished in under a minute, while the glass remains workable.  It’s an astonishing skill. 

A very good value tour becomes a rather expensive experience when we visit their warehouse showroom afterwards, but it’s all worth it.  Tour complete, we take a boat bus back to Venice’s rail station and walk a long, hot and uninspiring 45 minutes’ back to the car, through Venice’s concrete back office.

Onwards towards Treviso; we have booked a night in the Villa Tiepolo Passi, a delightful, family owned 17thcentury villa on a beautiful estate, complete with formal gardens and vineyards, 3km outside Treviso.  After our sleepless travails of the last few nights, and a generally humid and sweaty run of camping since leaving Rome, it’s total heaven. 

The boys get their own bedroom, we rejoice in the finest bathrooms and plumbing we’ve seen in months, and marvel at the views of the estate’s parkland and vineyards from our windows.  There are no restaurants open locally (being a Monday) so we discretely prepare some prosciutto and melon, and fresh pasta, under the shade of a beech tree, overlooking their ornamental moat.  Luckily no-one else is staying…

Day 73, June 25th.  Treviso – nr Brestovica, Slovenia, Veneto, 23-30C, thunderstorms, rain, sunny

The villa’s beds are about as comfortable as beds could be and by morning, we are much refreshed. Revitalised as we are, we eagerly set out on foot to a local bakery we’ve been recommended, just outside the estate’s rear gates. 

Unfortunately, we time our pre-breakfast walk perfectly with a passing thunderstorm, and despite taking shelter under a multitude of mature parklands trees en-route, we arrive at the bakery soaked to the skin, despite the precaution of wearing our jackets.  Only Ralph’s bears any remaining water-resistant ability.  We are not equipped for weather like this on this trip.

Later, dried off and topped up with yoghurt and granola from the car (to add insult to injury, by the time we’d reached the bakery they’d sold most of their breakfast goodies), we head into Treviso to buy supplies from their Tuesday food market, and to explore the city.

Treviso, surrounded by still intact medieval city walls and brimming with Romanesque and Venetian architecture, delightful duck and coot filled waterways, low bridges and pedestrian piazzas, could and should also rival Venice for the tourist euro.  Yet again, it receives a tiny fraction of those numbers.  We amble through the streets, enjoying its sleepy, super-chilled atmosphere, and the sun, which has now made an appearance.

After an excellent lunch we make our way through Treviso’s surprisingly pretty – and rural – outskirts, to GlassDrive.  Our replacement glass is ready and fitted within 45 minutes.  By 3pm we’re driving round the flat, fertile, vineyard filled plain over the top of the Adriatic, on the E70 autostrada heading towards Slovenia. 

Our heavily extended, deeply civilised Italian sojourn is drawing to a close. Reflecting as we reach the wooded hills near the border, we find it hard to imagine that we’re still in the same country as the simmering, rubbish-strewn, potholed beauty of Palermo, 25 days ago, or the arid hills of Basilicata in the south, or the lush, unimaginably beautiful cleanliness of the Torino Valley, or the remote splendour of Apennine Mountains that we’ve criss-crossed several times.  We haven’t even touched the Italian Alps or the great mountain lakes on this trip, or a host of other treasures in between.  Italy really does have all the toys.