After a filling breakfast at the monastery of (no, not gruel) bread, jams, toast, and a biscuit which tasted a bit like a Girl Guide biscuit, yoghurt and coffee, we headed back to the town centre to check out a bag shop we saw yesterday. Unfortunately it didn't open until 10:00am, the whole town seemed to operate at a laid back easy pace, old men sat around in the town square talking and whiling away the hours.

I really wanted to do a bike ride in Tuscany but Cortona was out of the question because of it's location on the side of a hill...and after Cinque Terre I think I've had my quota of exercise for a while now. The Information Centre lady told us we could hire bikes in a little town called Terontola but the weather wasn't looking too promising and as we rode the bus to Terontola it began to drizzle.

The guy at the hire shop was very helpful and assured us it was going to rain and wasn't keen for us to hire his bikes. He did however suggest that there was a chocolate festival happening in another town Perugia which sounded a perfect alternative. After consulting the train timetable we discovered we needed to wait an hour for the next train to Perugia and that it would take an hour to get there. As we wanted to find Bramasole (the house from Under The Tuscan Sun) this afternoon, we reluctantly decided that we'd have to give the chocolate festival a miss. In the end we could have done the bike ride as it didn't end up raining...obviously the Italians are as good at predicting their weather as we Australians are at predicting ours.

We caught the train back to Camucia and wandered around the markets, intrigued by the salted fish, assorted cheeses and cured meats that vendors were selling out in the open. There were an abundance of handbags but all were cheap Chinese imports rather than the real thing. There were lots of clothing stalls and we decided as the town wasn't big enough for a department store this how the locals did their clothes shopping. We take shopping centres for granted in Australia, but they are few and far between in the Italian countryside.

It was time to eat again and we both thought "Margarita pizza" but again it was during the dreaded time when most of the shops were shut...we were really going to have to watch our clocks if we ever wanted to eat before 3:00pm. The only pizza shop we found open should have been ashamed of the pizzas he was selling...here he was in Italy and he was passing off pre-made pizza that looked like something you'd buy in the bakery section in Woolies.

So it was back to Cortona, to the reliable cafe that stayed open when everyone else closed. But first we returned to the bag shop which was now open and our good friend behind the counter (it was about our fifth indecisive visit to her store) recommended a pizza shop just down the road, we thanked her, assured her we would be back with a final decision on the bags and set off.

We ate the best pizza I've ever had; the base was crispy but not hard, just right. I had a pear, walnut and gorgonzola cheese pizza which was unusual and very delicious, and Hayley had a margarita pizza.

It was then back to our beautiful accommodation to prepare for our journey tomorrow to Venice, the city of canals.