Italian cooking class! Trip advisor has been an excellent source of information for this trip, that is where I discovered information about a cooking class run by a local chef in a remote village that had rave reviews and was an absolute bargain - €38 for the class, wine and lunch, most of the classes in Tuscany and amalfi are €200 for a day! The chef moreno was a hoot, very Italian and full of great one liners. He showed us how to make tortellini from scra...

Breakfast was another delicious treat - ham and cheese with ciabatta, more fresh apricots and saffron almond cake made without butter (the weight watchers version?). More rain! I think it has well and truly set in, so this changes my plans for today. There is a local church perched on the side of the cliff that is a highly recommended hike, but only in dry weather, so I caught a boat to varenna, another old lakeside village. It is so quaint, there is a small ha...

I met my fellow hotel guests over breakfast, all American, and there were two women celebrating the 35th anniversary of their first trip to Italy and their friendship. The breakfasts are always highly anticipated at pensionnes as they are so homecooked - today homemade bread, local cheese, eggs, a bowl of apricots and cappuchino! It started out clear and fine, so i jumped on a boat to Lenno to check out the weekly local market and do the hike to villa balbianel...

What a difference 2 hours makes, the rain stopped, the sun came out and the lake became magical. Villa Carlotta is an old villa meticulously preserved with very famous gardens - a few weeks ago they were awash with flowering azaleas, but they were still very beautiful. Carlotta was given the villa as a wedding present from her mother a few hundred years ago, and her husband was a keen botanist. The family has preserved the collection of art that was collected (m...

I left Milan today after another breakfast Italian style, standing at the counter to drink my cappuchino with a pain au chocolat, by a train that continued on to Zurich. It still amazes me that you catch trains here to other countries like we catch local trains! My taxi driver threw a temporary dampener on things, wanting to know why I was going to lake como, it was boring and full of old Brits! It was pouring with rain when I arrived into como, and the cloud c...