Wow (rhymes very well with Ciao!) I have neglected my blog duties a bit - I would apologise but I have been busy walking, sweating, learning Italian ways, sweating, fighting off mosquitoes, sweating and being a bit of a tourist! As you may be able to tell, coming down from the mountains and onto the plains of northern Italy I walked into full blown summer. It's 32°C in the afternoon and my wonderfully english body is fairly useless in this situation. Hence the sweating, blister on my long suffering nose and a fast developing walkers tan. (Hilarious when i'm in my swimming things - brown or burnt arms, face and calves/shins - white torso and feet!) Actually arriving in Italy was a little dissappointing - border crossings feel quite symbolic to me (having walked to a new country) but the open EU pays little heed to them and it's actually tricky to know exactly when you have arrived. The mobile phone networks are much more frontier savvy though and cancel your coverage and apply roaming charges within a couple of metres!

I descended into Italy from the Col du Montgenevre and Claviere via the Gorge di San Gervasio. Picking my way past groups of climbers who were eating lunch on the suspended walkway that follows the gorge wall, I arrived in Cesana Torinese. Where I received the best welcome to a country a hungry walker could hope for - free food! My first test of Italian in the patisserie obviously drew sympathy and as I left with an ice cold can of fanta (why are italian drinks cans a different shape? taller and slimmer!) and some bread for lunch, la donna behind the counter stuffed a selection of pastries into a bag and pushed them into my hand with a big smile and "prego". I unashamedly skipped to the otherside of the road, sat down and scoffed!

That night I wild camped on the side of the mountain a little further down the valley. Bumbling out of my tent just before dark to go and brush my teeth in the stream, I disturbed a deer doing his late evening tour of his patch. He looked at me with distain before bounding off in a big arc around my tent, barking his annoyance as he went. Just as I lay down to sleep, a huge flash of lightening warned me of an equally huge crack of thunder. The next 2 hours sleep were lost to the thunder, lightening and thrashing rain that rebounded through the valley. As I headed past Sestriere and down the valley towards Pinerolo and Torino I was introduced to the Italian concept of a campsite. Buy a caravan, put it on a plot and build a sort of log cabin around it and don't move it. In between there is the odd grassy spot for random mobile campers - or just me! I rested for a day in Fenestrelle, where there is a huge hillside fort (the 2nd largest miltitary alpine installation behind the great wall of china - or some stat like that) which was of course shut the day I was there. Instead I took a bus to Torino for the day (to avoid walking past the remainders of Fiat car factories for 3 days!) to wander the covered walkway streets and sample my first Italian gelato - it didn't dissappoint!

Further down the valley in Pomaretto I found my first Italian couch surf with Valentina, Davide and their beautiful 1 month old son Samuelo. A lovely evening of pasta, wine, laughter and a kind of lemoncello with lavender was too short, as ever. The next day I could walk without my back pack - which was taken on to Pinerolo for me - where I talked football, ate pizza and more icecream with my host Feng. As a chinese student, studying in France, doing an internship in Italy with a swedish company, I think he could be the wikipedia definition of international - and great company! The hills stopped pretty abruptly at Pinerolo and I re-introduced my feet to flat tarmac stomping with a 40km day through farmland and thunder heavy skies. It was hard and sweaty work in the humidity, producing my first blister in weeks. A woman stopped in her car to ask where i was going and when I told her my destination of Carmagnola, she simply said "Fantastico" excitedly and drove off, passing me on her way back later with a big smile and thumbs up! Some slightly inaccurate footpath maps, a missing bridge and an annoying amount of toilet stops later I arrived in Carmagnola. My host here was Giovanni and he was going to Firenze (Florence) for the weekend and offered me a lift. As it was 400km south of my route it seemed foolish to pass up the opportunity to visit such a beautiful city and I gladly accepted. On the drive there we passed through Genova, which is a city on a hill by the sea that is so compact the autostrada weaves through it by a system of tunnels and bridges, like a crazy hamster run. Passing under appartement blocks and seemingly right past high rise windows.

My host was understandably tired after the drive and took a rest when we arrived. But I never envisaged I would be watching football on tv in a hotel room in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with an Italian guy I met the night before in his pants! (only later did I discover the air-con remote to deal with the heat!) The city was indeed beautiful and we spent the day wandering round the sights and streets, swallowed up by the number of tourists; Endless flocks of sheep swarming around a guide holding a specific patterened scarf in the air for them to follow. The sheer volume of them was quite a shock to my solo travelling system, maybe one day I will walk through a tourist group with a replica 'follow-me' scarf and see if they do! But the Ponte Vecchio, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Piazza Signore (with David, casually still forgetting his clothes) and the view from Piazzale Michelangiolo were well worth sharing with the hoards.

The following day was England's first match in the Euro's against France. We had to make a detour to Rimini on the way back for a meeting, but I managed to catch the first half there and the 2nd half on Italian radio in the car. Fairly easy to follow as there were no goals after half time! Late that evening as we neared Carmagnola on the motorway, we were treated to a spectacular lightening display from a cloud storm that filled the whole plain surrounding Torino. The blackness was punctuated by bursts of light that illumniated the huge clouds with amazing forks of lightening. We stopped at the toll booth to take videos as neither of us had ever seen anything so incredible before. The storm continued for several hours, lighting the sky line sporadically late into the night.

Continuing on my way I headed into the wine region of Asti, where i was treated to some of 'mothers' cooking at my hosts', including homemade Tiramisu. There was enough left to take some in a pack lunch the next day and the whole family waved me on my way in the morning with a few 'Mamma mia's' at the size of my bag! After the gentle hills of Asti I climbed again towards Monferrato and could have been fooled into thinking I had detoured to Tuscany. Neat rows of fruit trees, hill top strips of lavender being hoovered up by a tractor, huge fields of golden wheat and red roofed towns and villages perched on the sun-drenched hills. It was beautiful scenery but hard toil in the heat, especially when i was running late for the next England game. But i arrived in time for the perfect combination of Birra - Pizza - Calcio (italian for football) and a rare victory over Sweden.
The next day i planned a half-days walk to a campsite for a well earned rest and a laze by the poolside (pictured on the website). Only to find out the pool was seperate to the campsite and cost the same as a nights camping! And for once I wasn't the only roaming camper - a trio of Italian families turned up in their campervans just as i was finishing my red wine. Their late night alfresco dining didn't do much to help my planned rest and i lay in my tent raging, with my music on, rueing the failure of my planned days off. An armful of mosquito bites didn't help my mood either as i left early to try and avoid the heat of the day.

By now i was crossing the river Po (as far as I know there aren't any other teletubby named rivers on my route!) delta, which is a vast area of low lying farm land criss-crossed by irrigation channels and tributaries. Many of the fields in between are growing rice and the heat and the water means the air is full of flies. They gather and swarm around my sweat soaked head and every now and then dart up my nose, into my ear or behind my sunglasses. It's infuriating and I must look like a mad woman stomping along wildly swatting and flailing my arms at them, always in vain. It's all long straight roads too, endless raised lines of boring walking with only suicidal lizards playing chicken with the traffic and supportive truck drivers beeping and giving me a thumbs up as they pass to break the monotemy. Fuelled by more wonderfully homecooked pasta, I managed to squeeze in a visit to Milano, the style and industry capital of the north. Ironically there was a media project with London exhibiting display boards along the main shopping street. I passed, amongst others, boards about Amy Winehouse, the congestion charge and Banksy - fairly random.

The plan for the following weeks is to head a little north, back to the mountain foothills, to avoid the worst of the heat and insects of the lowlands, then head east again. Before long I will hopefully be back by the seaside near Venice. After living in Cornwall for a decade, this is the longest I have been away from the sea and I can't wait to get back to it. Who knows? I might even treat myself to a bit of a beach holiday too, hopefully with some familiar faces!