Bonjouro all

Hope you're well ? So we moved from Switzerland through a very mountainous / lots of tunnels journey into Italy and spent 2 nights right beside Lake Iseo, which was very pretty. We took a drive around the lake for the day and just relaxed by the lake - it was a bit rainy and we were out of cooking gas so had to cook everything, including breakfast and using the kettle, on the bbq !

We moved on to Verona and had a night in a central hotel, managed to find gas (phew !) Verona is very pretty, it has a lovely old Arena, you could really imagine the Gladiator days although they now hold operas etc there and were dismantling the stage whilst we were there so it wasn't as picturesque as it could have been ! We also saw 'Juliets balcony' which is, of course, fictional but they've made it look great and loads of people write love notes on the wall and lock padlocks onto a gate with their names on. Had a lovely pizza out complete with Pinot - true Italiano style !

We then moved on to camp just ouside Venice - it truly is a beautiful city and certainly lived up to our expectations. We spent the first day exploring St Marks Basicilca and all the back streets and then took the bus back to the campsite. The next day we didn't go in until late afternoon, we tooka fantastic gondola ride at dusk (thank you David and Helen for treating us !) - we had a lovely gondolier who sang a bit and whistled as well as chatting away to his mate on a different gondola ! The narrow back streets were great after dark and gave us a great impression of masked trysts and dark deeds ! After 3 nights we packed down in a morning mist and headed into Slovenia - we will cover the rest of Italy when we come back in from the south later in the trip

Love to you all x