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...

Another rainy day in milano so it was nice to sleep in and have a lazy start to the day. After a coffee served by one of the hottest Italians I've seen yet, I picked a couple of trams to catch to their terminus to see more of the city, getting off if I saw things that interested me. My lunch spot was a fantastic discovery - Milan goes all out with buffet brunch on the weekend but I did not have any suggested places to try. I stumbled across a chocolate cafe that...

I wanted to see a bit more of the real Milan today as I only saw a very touristy version of the food, the shops and the city yesterday. I bought my first subway ticket (always a bit daunting in a strange place in a different language) and caught the train to the duomo as it was the closest point to where I wanted to go - the canal district. This is a buzzing local neighbourhood that still has some existing canals and ancient monuments scattered amongst more shabb...