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...

10th September This morning we picked up our hire car from Piazza Roma in Venice. What we thought we would do was drop the car off in parking place and go back to the island for the morning, until we discovered that parking was 25euro. Plan B. Drive to Bassano del Grappa. This was our overnight stop on the way to lake Como. As the name suggests the region is a huge producer of Grappa. We stopped in at one of the distilleries to try some. Tastes like diesel fue...

9th September Today we went on a boat ride to the island of Murano. Very commercial and full of glass factories selling their wares. Still pretty and not as busy as Venice. This afternoon we got into the Basilica San Marco, not too much of a queue, not as impressive as I imagined. The mosaics are incredible but the rest, so so. I paid the extra and went up to the museum and verandah. The museum was very interesting as you could see the mosaics up close. Some pie...

8th September. Much more relaxed start to the day from yesterday. I forgot to mention that yesterday the boat trip into San Marco piazza took a lot longer than we thoughtit would. Our tour up the clock started at 10am and the boat landed at 10am. Run, run,run we made it and caught up to the tour guide. Today we allowed much more time to arrive for our "Secret Itineraries tour of the Doges Palace. It was very interesting and we went into the chambers of th...