Italy, then..

The Mincio is a major tributary of the Po flowing south from Lake Garda. It forms a series of lagoons around Mantua turning the place's skline into an inland mini-Venice before flowing into the larger river a few kilometres south of the city. Both rivers have cycle tracks running alongside them and you could easily spend a couple of weeks exploring the lower Po basin using the free sostas provided by local towns and villages. It's a relatively unvisited area, most of it an expansive poplar dotted plain, dead flat, but not unattractive. One day maybe.

We only managed a few kilometres of the marked cycle routes, the first stage connecting Monbazano to Peschiera del Garda. It was asphalt all the way, well signed and well used, by all age groups, shapes and sizes. 

We parked our bikes on the edge of Peschiera's ancient centre at a handily placed rack next to one of the old gates. The town is dominated by impressive moated bastions dating from the sixteenth century. The it was a frontier town between the Duchy of Lombardy and the Republic of Venice. The figure of a lion carved above the gate tells you it protected the latter's side of the border.

It was Saturday and Peschiera was heaving, not just with foreign tourists, - the place is much loved by Germans - but also day trippers. Verona, Mantua, Brescia are all less than an hour's drive away. We've had lunch here quite a few times, it's never been terrible but never memorable. We found a place on TripAdvisor that had positive reviews. 

Ristorante Pizzeria Sosta e Gusta is about a kilometre out of the centre but the walk proved worth it.The place was much less frenetic than the restaurants in the old town. It had a contemporary ambience, but the service was a tad off-hand. Gill had pizza, I chose a salad.

Back to the old town and a much anticipated return to Gelateria La Romana. Peschiera is a touristy place, search on Google maps for Gelateria and fifteen pop up. We haven't sampled them all because we went to La Romana first and loved it. The place has been going since 1947 so it must be doing something right. 

Then back down the cycleway to Monzambano. We were pleased to get back to peace and quiet. Well in truth relative quiet, you can't expect silence in Italy, manic campanology and unsilenced Vespas are a given .

We first visited Peschiera del Garda in 1995 at Easter, even back then it wasn't exactly quiet. Then as now it seemed to be the go-to place for people from southern Germany to take a short break. One of the pizza places had a variety called 'The Bismarck'. It involved sliced sausage. 

Over the years we have returned maybe seven or eight times, always early or late in the season. Though busy the Peschiera we remembered exuded a laid back, relaxed charm. This time, in early September, the town was traffic choked and somewhat frenetic.

Next day we drove less than eight kilometres south to Borghetto, a medieval village on the Mincio - or perhaps more accurately, in it. The heart of the settlement is formed by a collection of ancient water mills occupying small islands mid-stream. 

It's very picturesque, and consequently very popular because most of the mills have become restaurants. The place is clearly a much loved Sunday lunch spot. 

We decided to give lunch out a miss and settled on having coffee and cake instead. 

The server was very friendly and helped us with the pronunciation of the local delicacy. - Sbrisolona. 

It's a crumble style cake made with almonds and lightly spiced - very delicious. 'Ss-brisolona' is the sing-songy way to say it, not 'subrisolona'.

For some reason the village was full of small groups of men wearing identical William Tell style hats. 

Half a dozen of them sat down at the table next to us. We should have asked them what mysterious sub-culture they belonged to, but we didn't.

A christening party had gathered on the church steps, couples paused to take selfies on the bridge queueing up for the most picturesque shot. Read the news and you can despair of humanity, hang out with a bunch of Italians at Sunday lunchtime and you immediately feel more optimistic. I wondered if there was a specific term for a selfie with two people in it, it's a bit of a contradiction in terms if there's not.

Borghetto is one of those places you might well choose for a romantic lunch out. A wire mesh fence in front of one of the ancient waterwheels documents decades of these 'momenti di amore eterno'.

As we left the café it began to drizzle, rain had been forecast so with untypical foresight we had taken folding brollies with us. In truth hazmat suits would have struggled to protect us from the deluge which followed. In minutes the cobbled streets became rivers, by the time we reached the van we were soaked to the skin. The thundery rain persisted for an hour or so then it drizzled until early evening.

The long range forecast for Italy is unsettled, France and Spain less so. What to do, carry on heading towards Lake Trasimeno, heading home via the Cinqueterra or cut our Italian trip short and spend some time in Languedoc and the eastern Costa Brava. Common sense might tell you that it would be crazy thing to do - to cover northern Italy, the entire Mediterranean coast of France and a bit of Spain in a six week trip. However, when I did the maths it turned out there was little more than 100km. difference between the two. What price an azure Med view? By my calculation, a 100km is about €3.20 worth of diesel and less than a couple of hours driving. The head for the Med option could be the way to go.

Whatever our future plans, tomorrow we are heading to Bologna for a couple days, we'll choose between Umbria and the Costa Brava based on the long term forcast after then.

The big car park for tourists on the edge of Borghetto has been extended to include a sosta for a few dozen vans. As well as a service point it has a newly built sanitary block with showers (50 cents for two minutes), washing up sinks with hot water. It's great.

From Borghetto, rather than head south to Mantua we doubled back towards Peschiera so we could buy another camping gaz cylinder for the Cadac BBQ and hob. As we crossed the old fortified bridge across the Mincio the crenellated silhouette of Castello Scaligero filled the windscreen momentarily. It looked oddly familiar, then I realised that we had been here before. The castle dominates the main avenue of Parco Giardino Sigurtà. We visited the famous gardens on our first visit to Garda in April 1995, I took some video of the castle's striking outline. Somehow it must have stuck in my memory because as soon as I saw it today - ping!  "I had no idea we were so close to Sigurta," I commented.

The local road from Borghetto to Peschiera was narrow, big coaches from Germany kept bombing towards us, heading for the giardini, I guess. Sigurta is on everyone's North Italy bucket list along with Venice, Isola Bella and Juliet's balcony. 

To begin with the autostrada south towards Mantua was quiet. It's classic road trip stuff, the Alps diminishing in the wing mirrors as ahead in the misty distance the smoky outline of the Apennines slowly appear. Somewhere south of Mantua you cross the mighty Po, previously in 2022 on the way to Greece, full of shingly islets due to a long drought, this year swollen, the trees on each bank partially submerged. It can't all be down to the recent downpours, Italy must have had a very rainy summer. The verges on the roadsides are still green, usually by July they're straw coloured.

As we neared Modena the traffic intensified. You need to keep alert. Italians' reputation for crazy driving is probably ill-founded these days, certainly so far as speeding goes, partly because 40kph limits have been placed on many rural roads backed up by lots of cameras and double white lines. However, drivers remain opportunistic, so long as there is a gap a few metres longer than their vehicle they will nip into it irrespective of whether they are travelling at 20kph or 120kph. Moreover It doesn't matter if they're on a Vespa or driving a forty ton truck their approach remains the same. I don't find it scary anymore, but equally I am not inclined to emulate them. 

Bologna has two motorways around it, the inner tangentiale, and the E45, the northern Italian stretch of a 5000km long trans European highway. It runs from Alta in the Finnmark province of Norway to Gela on the southern coast of Sicily. I would love to drive it, but Brexit put the kibosh on trips of this length. It would be 1900km to drive from home just to reach the starting point in the Arctic, and a 3000km drive back to Buxton from Sicily - making the entire project a 10,000km round trip. Back in 2015/16 the van was out of the UK from September to June, but we flew home at Christmas and Easter leaving dear old Maisy in secure storage. Now, even with the Schengen rules in place, you could still do a mega trip if you split it and stored the van somewhere in Europe for three months. The problem is post-Brexit insurers in the UK have become very risk averse about long term European travel. I cannot find any insurer willing to cover the van for storage abroad, and next year, when we are both over 70, even maintaining the cover we already have is going to be a challenge. So my E45 project is doomed to remain a fantasy trip, but I have lots of those sloshing around in my head.

Which is just as well, because I'm reality were were not going anywhere, Both Bologna's motorways had ground to a halt, one big "ingorgo stradale'. 

Finally we arrived at 'Centro Turistico Città di Bologna. Italians have never quite escaped the Baroque era, understatement is utterly beyond them, so traffic wardens have epaulettes like Rear Admirals, traffic police conduct chaos like La Traviata and Bologna's municipal campsite sounds all the more grand when called 'Centro Turistico Città di Bologna'. In truth it's the best urban campground we know. Not vaguely sinister like the one in Bois de Boulogne in Paris, or comedically mis-managed by spaced -out gen zedders like the London sites in Lee Valley. Sadly, due to the city's year round popularity the campsite no longer accepts the Acsi low season discount card. At €44 per night plus tourist tax it's the most expensive site we've ever used. There are no other options, so we paid up for two nights, giving us one day to revisit the city. 

Bologna is made up of a network of arcaded thoroughfares built from the sixteenth to nineteenth century surrounding a compact medieval centre. It has to be one of the most people friendly urban designs on the planet especially as its food culture is equally renowned. Bologna, Donastia/San Sebastian. Puglia and Singapore are all places we have had amazing food. All good, all different, it's so tricky to decide which is our favourite, so we have to keep going back.

This time, rather than making a bee line to the foodie streets clustered around the old market we decided to head to Osteria dell Orso. It's been serving Bolognese classics for decades at a price students and workers can afford and continues to do so despite its worldwide renown. 

We caught the late morning bus from the campsite which dropped us outside of the main railway station. We hurried into the city even though it was still twenty minutes before the restaurant opened at 12:15. Arriving early is important as a queue usually forms well before then. 

Luckily only about a dozen people had made an orderly line outside the place. We joined the end of it and soon were seated on the terrace on the opposite side of the narrow street. The outside space is a newish addition since we ate here previously in June 2018.

Gill chose tagliatelle a ragu, I went for tortellini broddo, both are classic Bolognese dishes, the pasta handmade, cooked with love and respect for tradition, it's world heritage cuisine for about the same price as Bologna Starbucks lunchtime sandwich deal. 

Great cookery is not the preserve of Michelin starred chefs, it exists everywhere, hiding in plain sight if you know where to look. Even so, it's rarely as good as  here, in this unassumingly osteria in a graffiti daubed side street opposite a crowded parking lot for Vespas.

We had planned one further gastronomic mission - two small 'coppas' from Cremeria Santo Stefano - which we reckon, after extensive research, is the best Gelateria we have found in Italy. We mentioned this to the campsite manager when we booked in. He did not disagree, but added that he felt that Cremeria Cavour was equally good and that we really should try them both. Two gelateria in a single afternoon, ice cream orientated flaneurie, was this, I wondered, bordering on the the dissolute? Maybe, but we did it anyway.

Osteria dell Orso is a ten minute walk north of Bologna's Mercato di Mezzo, Cremeria Cavour five minutes or so south. I thought we knew central Bologna quite well. It's Italy's reddest city, with one of Europe's oldest and biggest universities. It's been a hotbed of leftist dissent for over a century. 

Generally Bologna's style is shabby chic rather than swanky. However Galleria Cavour, where our target gelateria was located is an exception to this rule of thumb. This compact mall is an island of Milano style high fashion marooned among the old city's proletarian, graffiti daubed alleyways. 

All the usual suspects were here, Prada, Gucci, Amarni, Polo Ralph Lauren as well as a few smaller high end outlets that I'd never heard of. One window showcased a single, dramatically lit faceless mannequin dressed in dusty pink trakky bottoms, a pale blue sweatshirt and ochre bucket hat sporting the fashion house logo. This cost of the get-up was listed discretely in the corner - astronomical! The bucket hat alone cost €400! Who would pay €400 for a bucket hat? The fashion industry is completely beyond me, I simply don't get it.

As you might expect from it's location Cremeria Cavour looked quite swanky. As was the cafe next door - the two seemed to be linked. However, they were no more expensive than anywhere else - I think we paid six euros something for two small 'coppas,' each with two different flavoured scoops. Reviews of the café next door commented that an espresso was only €1.60 despite its up-market demeanour.

I can't quite recall what we chose, other than the creamy concoction that Gill emulated the taste and texture of cannolo with flakes of caramelised Sicilian orange. It was sensational, 'a food memory' in the making something that you might recall years later..."remember that amazing orangy gelato in Bologna..."

Cremeria San Stefano is about a 15 minute stroll from Piazza Cavour, all of it through Bologna's incomparably beautiful arcades.

They have to be regarded as one of humanity's greatest achievements. if you are looking for something that epitomises the Italian renaissance I think you could make a case that Bologna's arcaded streets express its humanist intent more profoundly than some of the more obvious candidates, like the Sistine Chapel or Raphael's 'Stanzas'. I am not being preposterous here, what I mean, if you take the Sistine Chapel as an example, Michaelangelo's celebration of the human form does embody the new spirit of humanism, but it is used to assert the predominance of the sacred. In the end it is papal propaganda. 

Bologna's arcades celebrate the secular on a monumental scale asserting how ordinary life can have a grandeur too, and given proper consideration how the mundane can be soulful.

We arrived at Cremeria San Stefano to find a small crowd gathered around the shop front. The place 

is well known, queues do happen. Luckily it was a gaggle of American visitors being frogmarched around the city by a tour guide. He was mansplaining how to order a gelato, going through the ingredients of each one in minute detail. 

We snuck past and got served well before the guide wrapped up his spiel and the shop filled with well informed Americans. 

So who won in the Gelateria stand-off? A dead heat we decided, flavour of the day had to go to Cavour's cannolo inspired effort, but in general San Stefano's gelati are a little less sweet, so the flavour layers come through more.

We headed back to catch the bus but soon realised there was no way we would be in time for the 14:40. The next one was two hours later, but we were in no hurry. We wandered around the market area then mooched our way up Via dell'indipendenza. By the look of it Bologna's 'Oxford Street' was built in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. 

It adopts the style of the earlier arcades but the architecture reflects the confidence of a newly unified Italian state, somewhat florid and overblown like High Victorian on steroids. Some were built later around the 1890s by the look of them. What is the Italian term for Art Nouveau? Something else I've forgotten, Google to the rescue.... 'Stile Liberty'. I decided that actually I never knew this in the first place! 

It seemed a shame to me that this particularly beautiful example ended up as a branch of H&M. 

As befits a street that celebrates the unification of Italy a large equestrian statue commemorating Garabaldi overlooks the it. 

We browsed for a while in the Bialetti store. Once the manufacturer of humble stovetop aluminium Moka pots, now has re-invented itself as a bit of a style icon. 

The classic Bialetti pot pimped-up by Dolce and Gabbana and re-engineered to work on an induction hob retails at €108. We've used the basic version for years. It produces perfecto espresso machiato every lunchtime when we are travelling, and will continue to do so, especially since Gill took the opportunity to buy a replacement filter while we were in the shop.

Somewhat footsore we took a short cut through Parco della Montagnola, resting a while on exactly the same bench as we had occupied briefly five hours previously on our way to Osteria dell Orso. Google fit app on my phone reckoned we had walked over 7km, my legs felt that was a conservative estimate.

Back at the van we flipped through the photos we had taken and agreed that Bologna had to be one of our favourite cities. However the weather forecast for the next ten days still looked decidedly mixed across the whole of Italy. The plans we had, paddle boarding on Lake Trasimeno, a visit to the Cinque Terra - all demanded good weather. As the downpour in Borghetto had demonstrated, motorhoming is a fair weather pastime. The western Med looked to have a much sunnier outlook. What started as a joke became a distinct possibility, 

"We could head home via the Costa Brava, it's only 100km more than going back via Umbria," I had suggested unseriously a couple of days ago. No prizes for guessing what we did.