Sirmione - home of the zookeeper and swallows.

We’re back for a few days to sort out our visa. And what a kafuffle that is. Luckily the daughter’s Italian has improved after a week’s course, we needed it. Mine was relatively straightforward as I was renewing it but the daughter’s working holiday visa had them confused as they’d never heard of it. The daughter argued her way through it and eventually he went to look it up and found it. He was lovely after that but we were holding our breaths and then he saw our surname and we became instant friends. Everyone here seems to love a Vecellio surname, this policemen knew about the famous Renaissance painter Titian and when we say we are linked with him, doors open. Then the daughter has to have her fingerprints taken but the wifi is down, so the police tell us to go and have a coffee and hopefully the internet will return, as it does. We are done, celebrations! They will call us to pick up our visas at some time, hopefully before we return home.

Then the daughter’s partner arrives and we celebrate with a home cooked meal and a Negroni. The next day we head up to the fossil museum Dolomythos again where we have a platter of local cured meats and cheeses. The church is beautiful, little gardens in front of the cemetery plots, all carefully tended. Then we come upon a singing event with groups of women singing and dressed in traditional costumes with stalls selling beer and sausages. There is an Austrian feeling in the air as it’s on the border, the town having an Italian name and an Austrian one, San Candido and Innichen.

And then we’re off again, leaving the girls behind to catch up.

LAGO DI GARDA - SIRMIONE

We arrive at La Casa di Marla in Sirmione, on Lago di Garda and what a character Marla is! She has a beautiful rustic old stone house, one of the few remaining ones in the area. She is a retired zookeeper, covered in tattoos and running her B&B with flair. Our rooms are beautiful, lace and interesting antiques cover the walls and when we open the shutters, four lots of swallows nests are perched in beams in the courtyard. We watch them come and go, it becomes our afternoon activity after a day out.

We head off to dinner in the heat and find Vecchio Mulino, a restaurant set in an old mill on the shores of the lake at Peschiera del Garda. I have a Limoncello spritz and they bring us a small loaf of bread, the recipe of which dates back to the 1800’s, the flour being milled here. In the 19th century, bread in this region was considered a luxury and only used for Christian holidays. The bread is amazing and served with the nutty green olive oil, the fritto misto is great as is the theatrical production of the creme brulee. But the head waiter made the evening for us, welcoming and professional, he had worked in restaurants in Sydney for three years and knew more about our politics than most Australians.

We head back to a mattress situation - there are two like the Princess and the Pea situation and the second one doesn’t fit the bed, in fact it hangs over the sides and you end up on a slant in the middle of the night or worse, hanging off the edge, so we drag it off and prop it up on the wall and finally sleep peacefully. The next day after breakfast in the beautiful dining room, we head off to Sirmione, which boasts a rare example of a medieval port fortification, the Scaligero Castle.

We pass the lemonade stall which I remember as being there at least twenty years ago.Then we enter via one of two drawbridges over the moat. The water is crystal clear, with ducks nesting on floating wooden platforms. The town is already full of impressed tourists, us included. We think about walking to the Grottoes of Catullus but it’s too hot so we end up taking a boat ride there which ended up being the perfect way to see the Roman villa built around the 1st century BC. It is one of the most exceptional finds of a Roman villa in northern Italy. It’s magnificent and the best way to see it in the heat.

Then we have a perfect lunch - stuffed squid in a fava bean sauce which was delicious and stuffed zucchini flowers with a capsicum sauce and then back home to watch the swallows feeding their young and doing their swirling dances under the eaves.

That night we went to Desenzano del Garda where we ate seafood pasta and marvelled at the slow descent of night here, the pale salmon and pink colours on the horizon of blue.

Next day we go to the Parco Giardino Sigurta, a beautiful garden with questionable plastic sculptures throughout, made with recycled plastic but still a shock in this ancient garden setting. Again it’s suggested we get a golf buggy to go around as it is a huge acreage and having just read about the dangers of these vehicles, I’m not keen but then I decide to give it a go and at the speed we’re going, I think we’re safe.

From there, we go to Borghetto sul Mincio, one of the prettiest villages in Italy we’re told by our ex zookeeper and she is right. It’s a beautiful little hamlet on a river that is crystal clear and full of water mills, where flour used to be ground. We find a restaurant right on the Mincio river and have amazing homemade rolls and wholemeal grissini flavoured with fennel and while waiting for our food, I spy an azure blue dragon-fly and then others, flitting in and around the water.

The food is good, I have an asparagus torte which is delicate and served on a frothy parmesan sauce, then we have stracciatella with prawns with beautiful spicy olive oil and a brulee flavoured with lavender.

And then we’re in Lazise for dinner later that night, for a Limoncello spritz that arrives with so much free food! The town is surrounded by medieval fortress walls but we’re too tired to wander too much.

We stumble upon a restaurant that specialises in mussels and we’re in. The very beautiful hostess finds us a seat and her young son, probably aged nine or ten, very proudly escorts us to our seats, speaking English. This place is great, we’re given a bib (for the messy sport of eating mussels) and a menu that is like a newspaper and we order the fried mussels with a garlic sauce and then a huge bowl of them with different sauces, even a gorgonzola one. Replete and exhausted, we head home.

The next morning, we say our goodbyes to Marla and we compare our tattoos. She wins!

Trabocco territory.

We are going to lunch on a trabocco! A trabocco is an old fishing platform typical of the Abruzzi coast. They were invented in the 18th century to combat fishing during bad seasons. They are wooden structures built slightly out into the sea with a system of wooden arms and winches that lower and raises nets that intercept the flows of fish moving through. There are around forty left and about fourteen of them have been made into restaurants that are only open for a few months a year. We were lucky enough to book into one.

We park and walk down to Trabocco Pesce Palumbo. Hand painted signs welcome us and as we walk down some steps and turn a corner, our senses are assailed by the beauty of this structure. A long wooden jetty jutting out into the blue, blue waters of the Adriatic. We walk down and see the complex structures of the netting and winch system and are shown to our table on the sea, crossing a glass floor that showcases the azure blue of the water below us.

There is no menu, we wait with anticipation of how this works. It was so hard to try and book that in the end the hotel booked for us and I didn’t even ask the price. And so it begins….

First a bottle of Prosecco appears and wonderful sourdough bread. Then the courses start appearing. Firstly a paper cone of fried anchovies. Next, three dishes, squid with zucchini and almonds; a local fish with the sweetest tomatoes I have ever tasted with thin slivers of Tropea purple onions and cod with capsicums in a vinegary sauce. Then another platter of three - a local fish with pine nuts; stuffed mussels; eggplant slices with another type of local fish. And then another bottle of wine - an organic Rose that is to die for.

And then the mains arrive. A local handmade pasta with prawns in a delicate tomato sauce; a seafood soup; fritto misto - delicate tiny fish and calamari. We are done and slightly drunk, the seagulls are watching us hopeful but we are not sharing.

We sit back, stomachs full after a couple of hours eating and then out comes dessert! Cherries and little almond tarts with espresso and Limoncello. We are done! And slightly concerned about the bill but when it arrives we are amazed. Fifty euro each, about seventy Australian dollars!

We make it to our hotel and lie in a stupor that breakfast time. And again this is amazing. They have special waffle type pancakes with cinnamon and orange; baby donuts, a ricotta and chocolate cake that is wonderful and then I have to try the pistachio tart. I go for a long walk and then we’re back on the road, heading towards Auronzo via Brisighella which is somewhere in between and not so easy to find.

But when we do, we find a sleepy village that as always in Italy, comes alive at night.

We find a beautifully renovated hotel where we leave our bags and head out for a drink after a very long drive. Nothing is open, although it’s five o’clock and aperitivo hour. We eventually find a decrepit bar where old men seem to hang out and watch tv. It’s run by a waitress who has seen it all. She makes me a Spritz that knocks me out in three sips and tells us this is a bar run by the church. Oh Italy, only here would the priests run a bar for the local poor and down and out.

Then we are told about a restaurant we should try and they also do a set seafood or meat menu. We didn’t think this one through, especially after last night. The first plate arrives with seven different seafood dishes, then homemade pasta and seafood, fried fish, zuchinis and a skewer of prawns and then dessert of profiteroles. We hardly touched our meals, just sampled the flavours and realised we won’t be ready to do this again for another year.

Of course, we do manage breakfast of homemade jam tarts and coffee as I have another five hour drive ahead of us, picking up the daughter on the way at Venice airport where she’s arrived after a week studying Italian in Syracuse which she absolutely loved.

Alberobello. The town of the taxi dodgers of old.

The next day we head off to Alberobello, the town of the Trulli.

I always worry about parking in these small towns, you usually end up outside the town in car parks that you pay a lot for but here, we park in someone’s backyard full of ancient olives and cherry trees for a small fee and pay a euro for a bag of freshly picked cherries.

The town is crowded. We came here with my late husband many years ago when it was quieter and we stayed in a trulli, the little round stone houses that people built to avoid the tax collector. These round houses could be built up and dismantled fairly easily when the tax man arrived and he would find a pile of stones.

We wandered and found a beautiful art gallery and bought tiny ceramic scenes of the trulli that were then fired in the raku method in a pit fire, the colours are gorgeous, bronzed and coppery. There are cute shops everywhere.

Then we lunch at a restaurant fronted by an eccentric man, sporting an apron of cherries, a rainbow scarf and Italian flag coloured braces. Whatever the food is like, we have to go there. But it was good, an appetiser of foccacia with sweet tomatoes and a platter of prosciutto and the famous Pugliese burratas (this is where they come from) and sweet sun dried tomatoes.

We walk out into the quietened streets as people have disappeared for lunch, the whitewashed walls of the buildings are so bright against the dense blue sky. On some of the buildings are the different symbols that were used to ward off demons and bring good luck. They do beautiful cotton loomwork here as well.

On our way home we stop by a field with a lone trulli in the middle, surrounded by swaying late summer grasses. Italy is full of diverse yet distinctive architecture, fascinating.

And then we get very lost on our way back to Matera. We go from a proper road to a very improper road leading to farmland which gets narrower and narrower until we see a sign pointed to The Crypt of the Living Dead! And although we'd really like to check it out, we have a tour booked in Matera (see previous post) so I do a five point turn and head back in the right direction.