21st September Todaywe woke to sunshine. Yeah. After having a morning coffee with Klaus and a look around his place, which is right on top of the hill overlooking Rapallo, we drove around the coast to Porto Venere. This is a picturesque port with a protected fishing harbour lined by colourful houses. The old church out on the point, typically decorated in the horizontal stripes of many Italian churches, has a great view from the top. We hada lovely dinner at K...

19th September I am happy to be back in Italy. Today was our first full day in Rapallo. It rainedyesterday and started off raining today. We decided to go to the aquarium in Genoa to escape the weather. What a waste of time and money that was. After the aquarium we wandered around the old town of Genoa. Genoa is a large port city in northern Italy. Cruise ships and ferries leave from here to places such as Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Sardinia. As such it is a b...

14th September Today we went to Switzerland for lunch. I just love the way that that sounds! Instead of driving to the other side of the lake, like yesterday, we decided to take the car ferry over. Very short trip about 10 mins. Lugano is about ½ hours drive from Menaggio where the boat drops you off. Lugano is on Lake Lugano and is a lot smaller than Como or Lake Como. Not as picturesque. We walked around did some shopping , had some lunch and came home. Rig...

September 13th Last night we collected a very tired Matt from Milan Malpensa Airport. It's good to have him with us. After familiarising our selves with the area yesterday, today we went a little further afield. We decided to visit Villa del Balbianello as our one palazzo visit. From where we are staying, more of that later, we can see the villa only about 500m to a km away, yet to drive it took about 11/2 hours. We had to drive back down to Como and then up t...

September 11th We are sitting in our apartment on Lake Como watching the most spectacular storm. There is thunder echoing through the valley, lightning flashing and hail stones the size of jaffas. Welcome to Lake Como. We arrived into town to find the access road to our village, Lezzeno, closed. Road works apparently. So time for Basil to find an alternate route. We drove in to Bellagio via the mountains. What a spectacular view. Once again, this place is amaz...