New Year’s Resolution no.3

….was to blog. So here I am. Blogging. About what? I’m not sure yet. Maybe about my newly discovered love of beautiful art? Maybe about my renewed fascination with the history of Ham House because of my fabulous new book about it? Maybe about cake?

Well, let’s start with the cake. Here is a box that once contained a chocolate orange cake.

Danda had one peice. Someone else ate the entire rest of the cake, thinking it might help with her cold because oranges contain vitamin C, right? That someone else had been sworn off sugar because of the sugar headaches and achy teeth caused by their new job as a cake maker. The someone else now feels chocolate guilt and wishes not to be named.

Talking of new jobs, it’s been an interesting year. In the space of twelve months, the following things have happened;

1. Got two new jobs. One I disliked. One I loved. Thankfully I am now in the one I love!
2. Lost a good friend to the murky depths of Texas’ capital punishment system.
3. Went to France (for lunch), Italy (for my birthday) and America.
4. Visited the NASA space centre.
5. Became a ghost tour guide.
6. Made this (the website, not the art)
7. Became addicted to Candy Crush, Breaking Bad and Modern Family.
8. Purchased the most expensive (but most worth it) book I’ve ever owned.
9. Discovered pretty art and fabulous painters (current favourites are Sir Peter Lely and Van Dyck)
10. Got to know the life of the river better, via my walk to work. (And learnt about the importance of knowing the tide times!)
11. Got reacquainted with my childhood best friend when she came to stay in the spare room.
12. Had a cold for a month.
13. Watched family jet off for a new life under the Australian sun.
14. Met a fellow blogger for the first time.

There has been a lot of change in the last year, some of which I’m still getting used to. Here’s to 2014! I wonder what will happen.

Travel advice

Thinking of going on holiday? Got something booked but need advice on the sights? Look no further than today’s blog. All your travel questions answered.

Danda on the Taj Mahal:
“Shite. Really, really disappointing. Right in the middle of nowhere.”

Danda on the Golden Temple in Amritsar:
“Fabulous. Great day out. Best place we went in India.”

Danda on Mumbai/Bombay:
“Second favourite place on my Indian Odyssey. And we won the Test Series.” (Cricket-speak, I’m guessing.)

Danda on going to a test match in Mumbai/Bombay:
“Indians really love their cricket. It’s more like a religion than a sport. It was noisier than the FA cup final. It was 40 degrees and the humidity was off the scale. Really really enjoyed it, especially as we drew the game to win the series.”

Danda on the pyramids:
“Best thing I’ve ever seen.”

Danda on going down into the pyramids:
“Nope! Wouldn’t go! It wasn’t cause I was frightened. It’s just that I… I’ll go tomorrow… Next time.”

Danda on the Caribbean:
“Fabulous beaches. Uh. What else can you say about the Caribbean? I wouldn’t recommend the cuisine. Unless you like chicken, rice and peas. Great cricket grounds! Fav island = Antigua. Lovely people.”

Danda on Rome:
“The Eternal City. Wonderful place. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. And Laura took me there for my birthday.”

Laura on the Philippines:
“Unbelievably idyllic. Gorgeous, like a brochure. Luscious, green, sunny, pale beaches. I think I’ll retire there one day.”

Danda on Florida:
“Best place in the world for a fun vacation.”

Danda on Niagara Falls:
“Awesome!”

Laura on Niagara Falls:
“I have photos of me looking grumpy there. Not any prevalent actual memories. Just some grumpy photos.”

Danda on Bangkok’s red light district:
*pulls a face* “Uh. Yeh. Alright for a laugh. Not very tempting but good for a laugh.”

Laura on Bangkok’s red light district:
“Where else in the world can you find clubs unashamedly blazoned with the name Superpussy?”

Danda on Amsterdam’s red light district:
“I was drinking at the time. Good place to go for a drink. But, like any red light district, you’ve got to go with the right people. People that are game for a laugh and aren’t easily offended.”

Danda on the Inca Trail:
“A beautiful experience. That’s all I can say.”

Laura on trekking the Great Wall of China:
“Epic. Jaw dropping scenery. I swear Mordor was based on this place. The Chinese are the friendliest people I’ve met.”

Danda on Paris:
“I’ve been ten times probably. Good place to take a bird. Specially if her name’s Laura.”

Danda on Germany:
“Wonderful place. Great people. Great country.”

Danda on the south of France:
“Wonderful, wonderful place. I love France. Cannes and Nice are fabulous places.”

Danda on Italy:
“La Dolce Vita.”

Danda on the Algarve:
“If the weather’s good, it’s a good place to go. Golf is prohibitively expensive!”

Danda on Sri Lanka:
“Really interesting place. And the hottest place I’ve ever been! And we won the Test Series.” (I think this is cricket-speak too.)

Danda on Spain:
“Love Spain. Love the Spanish way of life.”

Danda on London:
“Best city in the world by far. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a London cab driver.”

Life since Italy

Since being back from Italy, so not to feel sad, I’ve kept myself busy with the following activities.

1. Lunching on salad to detox from the Italian carb onslaught

2. Buying trees for the patio. I wanted an olive tree and a fig tree so I could pretend I was still in Italy but apparently neither get good fruit in England. We got a plum tree…

…and one of our neighbours gave us something but we haven’t worked out what it is yet.

Any ideas anyone?

3. Seeing friends for dinner and getting lovely presents.

4. Planning to pull down the garden shed and put a vegetable patch there.

5. Feeding my worms my vegetable peelings and sprinkling cinnamon around the compost bin to stop the ants invading (it works!)

6. Volunteering at Ham House again. I was there yesterday and it was my first day by myself baking in the kitchen there and it went really well. People liked my biscuits, no-one vomited and lots of people said “Mmm.” I’m taking that as a good sign.

7. Hanging the washing out in the garden and acting all Disneyfied because it’s sunny (it later poured and the washing is still wet on the line but whatever).

W is for…

WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?

…my constant request whilst in Pompeii earlier this week. I had seen a programme about Pompeii a few weeks before going and the historian lady, strolling around looking at things, stopped behind some of the now-famous plaster casts of Pompeian people who were found when excavating the town. She said something like “This is the first thing that greets you when you enter Pompeii.”

Well, thought I, this will be excellent. I shall see the actual people. I will see their faces and can imagine what their lives must have been like and imagine them in these grand homes.

I find it fascinating, imagining the people going about their daily lives. It suddenly makes history a really alive subject that I can connect with because I can start to imagine myself in the past and how different my life would have been from the one I am now leading.

So we entered Pompeii, my eyes scanned for the Pompeians lying on the ground….

Eventually, walking into the Stabian Baths, we saw a few in glass boxes…

…and it was so strange. On the TV programme, they had talked about pyroclastic flows and ash falling and four different flows of something, which had meant that people had died almost immediately. There was no long drawn-out choking to death or disease or anything. They had been caught unawares and had barely any time to try and escape. So when I looked at the man in the top case, I imagined him seeing the ash falling and lying down and covering his face and being immortalised that way, forever. How strange, that the smallest action has defined his life forever. Of all the other things he did in his life here at Pompeii, he is forever defined by covering his face from the approaching disaster.

We kept walking but it was a long time before we saw any more people, which had become my obsession at Pompeii, a little bit.

Danda walking across the stones set high up in the road so people could still cross the road when it was raining.

Me ‘working’ in the Pompeian version of a deli.

Wall paintings

Floor mosaics

More people! The lady on the programme said that this position with the arms is typical of someone going into rigor mortis after a shock.

This one is strange in a totally different way. His exposed skull and two thousand year old teeth poking out from the plaster made me feel odd, like I’d accidentally seen someone undressing.

You can even see the shape of the belt he was wearing when Vesuvius decimated the town.

We found some more people in an area which seemed to be blocked off for archaeologists to work in, although there were none there at the time. In between all the wine jars and other artefacts, there were some more people.

The lady on the programme talked about how this person had probably crouched down and put their hands to their face to stop the ash going on it.

This person, it seems, dived on the floor and hid their face.

O and here’s one we found. Just in amongst the wine jugs on the shelf. Have you spotted him yet?

After looking at loads more buildings and reading in my little guidebook about what it used to be and who used to live there, we were back near the entrance, we had been there for five hours and were both knackered.

“But I didn’t see the people from the programme…” I said sadly.

Danda insisted we go and find them, even though I was tired and said it was ok. He reminded me that we don’t know if we’ll ever come back here so we mustn’t go home disappointed. So off we went, back into Pompeii, not much time to spare before closing, the tourists almost all gone, to find “the people.”

We trekked right back to the other end, near to the vineyards which, by the way, they have replanted and turned back into working vineyards (the wine produced there is called Villa dei Misteri) and eventually we found them! The people! The people lying on the floor! Hurrah!

And it was so interesting. I was enthralled, standing up against the glass case imagining who’s children they were, which house had been theirs, whether they had worked in the vineyards, as that is where these 13 were found during excavations or whether they had lived close by and just run there together to shelter.

Eventually, time and daylight were running out so we made our way back to the entrance, having added an hour on for “the people” and left, among the last few.

What a brilliant brilliant day. Damn planes and trains and the history of the automobile, give me some real people’s faces and clothes and lives to look at and I’m planning my future as an archaeologist/historian.

That’s inbetween my full time job as a farmer, my part time job as the world’s best baker, my hobby as an internationally renowned pianist and my ongoing project as a human rights lawyer.

I can fit it all in, don’t you worry.

V is for…

It’s the guest blogger handling ‘V’ today, a day later than usual…

 

FIVE!

Given that LLM is over in Italy as I write this post I thought I’d try and do something a bit Roman/Italian-ish. Of course, in the title, I mean the Roman numeral V which represents 5 in that counting system. I was watching a programme on TV recently in which someone had brought an antique grandfather clock in to be valued. The interesting thing was that in the “4” position it had “IIII” and not, as we might have expected, “IV”. They expert guy explained that it was more to do with the aesthetics of the clock face. The 4 position is the mirror of the 8 position and as 8 is represented by “VIII” makers wanted to display the face as symmetrical as possible so used “IIII” as an alternative to “IV”. Now just in case you didn’t realise, with Roman numerals the system is that symbols after V mean you add them on to V and symbols before V mean you take away (“VI” = V + I, “IV” = V – 1); similarly with the other main single letter numbers L (50), C (100) & M (1,000). If you think about it it’s very similar to our own way of representing numbers. If you take 32, for example, we know (but we don’t do it) that it is 30 + the 2 after the 3 and so on. 32 only has meaning because we know what it represents: 2 x 1 added to 3 x 10 meaning there are 32 “things”.

However it got me thinking about the “V”: why didn’t they use “IIIII” for instance? And carry on up to say 10 (their X) the base number of modern counting systems. How did they get from “IIIII” to “V”? It seems there are at least a couple of schools of thought: one, that the V came from an earlier system where 5 was represented by “Λ” and two, that the symbols came from tally stick markings. The tally marks were notches cut into a “counting stick”: “I” meant 1, “II” meant 2 and so on. In this system of cuts in the wood, for a number like 7 you would see “IIII ΛII” cut into the stick. I think you can easily see what could have developed next: once you got a “Λ” mark meaning the 5^th item had been counted you didn’t actually need the first four “IIII” because people knew they were kind of included in the “Λ”. Then at some point, whether the Romans themselves introduced it or not, the “Λ” was inverted to become the symbol we know today as five – “V”. Seems plausible to me but I won’t fall out with you if you disagree. And on the back of this there is a view that says when you got to 10 you had two of the symbol “Λ” carved into the stick and by inverting one and placing it on top of the other you got X for 10. Again a bit subjective but I like that one.

One further explanation suggests that way back in the beginning when humans were first developing the idea of counting or giving a value to a group of items they would have used the fingers of their own hands. Hold up your own hand and open the fingers and thumb and what shape is formed by the thumb and first finger – a V shape (although not completely symmetrical as the thumb is shorter). It’s not a great leap to see how by using two hands once you get more than 5 objects you could count up to 10. This also seems very plausible.

And that’s it for “V” is for five.

And finally – if you’re wondering when we stopped using the Roman numerals and started using our modern day 1,2,3,4,5 etc (called Arabic) – it was in the 13^th century. The strange thing is that in the purely Arabic system the number 5 looks much like our 0 and 0 itself is represented by a dot ( “.”). (The “V” and “Λ” are 7 & 8 in that system.) The guy who most people believe was responsible for the change from Latin to our current system was Leonardo Fibonacci; his book, in 1202, was called Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). You might recognise his name as many will have heard of the expression “Fibonacci Numbers” named after him; he didn’t actually invent the concept, as it had been previously reported by Indian mathematicians, but gave an example in his book. A Fibonacci number, if you remember your maths lessons, is one which is the sum of the previous two. The start position is usually given as 0 followed by 1. This then generates the series 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc.

 

Lemons and ice cream on Capri

Yesterday started well. We rose early, repacked our already stuffed suitcases and jumped in a taxi to Gatwick. As we had already checked in online, we just went to give our bags in and headed through security. The flight was quick and fuss-free (read: I slept through it) and we had landed in Napoli before I could say ‘truffles’.

Danda, ever the efficient man-on-board, said lots of words to me about buses and ports and things while I nodded politely and looked around squinting my eyes and pretending to help when really I didn’t know what I was looking for.

We found our way onto a bus to the port and purchased tickets to Capri. The boat was leaving in half an hour so we were on it before we had time to get bored. After a 40 minute boat ride across the Bay of Naples, we reached Capri, a mountainous island, looming out of the sea and rising up to meet the clouds.

Danda came to life again leading us to the ticket booth for the funicular, the train up to the main town. Tickets purchased, we waited a few minutes for the next train. It’s not really a train as such. It’s a cable car that runs up the side of the (extremely steep) mountain and gives you your first glimpse of Capri life.

Lemons trees are in every direction, the sea is the backdrop to everything and houses are positioned on the edges of the impossibly steep slopes. Despite the plane-bus-boat-train combo, which had taken about six hours, we felt refreshed by Capri, as soon as we arrived.

We found our hotel, the Hotel della Piccola Marina, easily enough, a short walk away from the main square and designer-shop-lined streets but far enough away that it felt quite and relaxed. When we walked into the hotel, we knew we had picked a winner. The receptionist was friendly, chilled out and welcoming, like we were old friends come to visit him at home. He looked comfortable and easy as he walked around, showing us the hotel and our room.

(The decor is refined and relaxed)

That sums up Capri pretty well actually, comfortable and easy. There are very few people about as it is not the tourist season. The shop assistants and restaurant owners do not shout out in the street, trying to attract you in. They sit, working on their ceramics or paintings or jewellery, and you are left to wander in and out of them as you please. On the one hand, this could be seen as unwelcoming or aloof. On the other, it is fabulous because you can potter at your own pace, stopping here, looking there, having an espresso as you wish.

It’s like the islanders know that visitors are here to do nothing so they leave them to move to their own rhythm.

And we loved it immediately. The views from the balcony promised much for our afternoon so we put on walking shoes and got exploring. And we walked and walked and walked! Up this road, down that one, round this corner, down this path.

We found the Roman Emperor Augustus’ garden….

…and had a lemon ice drink from the hugest lemons known to man…

We also found a huge tower of flowers and so photographed me next to them. Look.

We then returned to change before heading out to dinner, which wasn’t that photogenic but tasted great. I had the veal escalope with marsala sauce and potato and parmesan croquettes in a restaurant patronised by the celebrity elite.

Every place worth its salt has a fair few of these pictures. Anne Hathaway, J-Lo, Rod Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Elton John…. Capri is the land of the rich and the famous, of the moneyed classes, of those who can afford the singular luxury offered in the fashion boutiques and the unique perfume shops, offering fragrances made in small batches on the island to methods used by 13th century monks.

And we like it. We’re thinking of doing a Graham Greene and moving here. Anyone got any money we can borrow?

We finished the evening by finding an icecream vendor near the main square and got a little something to sustain us for the walk back to the hotel.

R is for…

R&R!

That’s right. Danda and I are leaving these wintery shores (well, not exactly wintery, it’s quite nice and sunny in England now) for warmer climes abroad (my weather app says there’ll be cloud but I’m hoping otherwise).

Yes, we’re off to Italy. To the beautiful island of Capri. To the coast. To the sea. To the pizzas of Naples. To the ash-preserved ruins of Pompeii. To the volcanic heights of Vesuvius. To the colossal sights of Capua. To the porcini mushrooms and fresh asparagus of the street markets. To the truffle laden plates of pasta. To the bowls piled high with homemade icecream. To the strong palate-cleansing espressos. To the mountains and the blue skies and bays of the Amalfi coast.

Off we go! Here’s hoping my phone works over there!

Remembering brighter days…

Hi all. For some reason, in London at the moment, it just feels like it’s been winter for ages. Now I’m not a real sun seeker or anything but it would be nice to have blue skies again. In honour of this, and that I am going to Italy next month, here are some pictures of blue skies from Rome last year!

Constantine’s arch

Trajan’s markets

Piazza Navona fountain

Trevi fountain

Palatine Hill

The baths of Caracalla

A temple to a goddess… I’ve forgotten who.

Bridge over the Tiber

On mushrooms

Yesterday, I found an old skirt which had little pictures of mushrooms all over it and so I wrote about mushrooms for my Nanny Rhino. I am going to share my mushroom chat with you as I wrote ten thousand words yesterday catching up on the days I missed with Nanny Rhino so I am all written out for a day or so.

 

There are so many things to do and places to go with mushrooms that it’s hard to know where to start. I’d love to start in Rome, where any restaurant worth it’s salt would be proudly displaying a wooden crate of porcini mushrooms on one of its tables outside. Since this visit and my mass consumption of the fantastic porcini mushrooms, I am struggling with eating them here as they are all of the dried variety, which was fine and nice and lovely, until I saw the fresh ones in Italy. Now I feel differently about dried porcini. I feel a bit sad for them as they are trapped there on the shelf, in a little jar, moisture-less. Without any fresh porcini of my own, I am simply not eating porcini mushrooms. It is a sad state of affairs. Dried porcini are great for risottos though, as you can use the soaking liquids to hydrate your rice. It’s still not quite the same though, is it?

 

My next favourite mushroom is probably an oyster mushroom as I love their shape and texture. I love how wild and uncouth they look, all misshapen and not at all uniform like their little cousins, the button mushrooms. The problem with this could be that people may mistake your oyster mushrooms in your stir fry for a slab of fat off the meat (as happened to me when making a duck stir-fry), so it’s your decision whether you want to run the risk of being thought of as a ‘fat-cooker’.

 

Shiittake are my next favourite, for similar reasons to the oyster mushroom. It is kind of irregular and a dark mysterious colour. They have a great flavour that I love cooking with beef in a stir-fry.

 

Enoki mushrooms, so long and thin and tiny are great for throwing into dishes last minute, for an extra bit of flavour. Their size means they don’t need much cooking before they soften and taste lovely. I love putting them onto a pizza last minute before quickly oven baking it as it adds another element to something with relatively few ingredients.

 

Next we have the portobello and the chestnut mushrooms, larger, meatier and better for roasting than their smaller counterparts. They can also hold their own quite well in a pie or vegetarian lasagne with spinach and ricotta.

 

Lastly we have the humble button mushroom, great for general use, fabulous fried in a breakfast, but with less of the qualities that draw me so well to the other mushrooms.

 

Actually, I have a less-than-fantastic memory connected to a portobello mushroom. I was seeing a guy for a few months and we could both see that things were in steady decline. In the height of our excitement while things were great, though, we had booked tickets to go to a literature festival somewhere in the countryside. The ticket had been quite expensive and I had booked the day off work so I was reluctant to give it up. Also the gentleman in question didn’t seem that keen on letting the relationship go, although I knew he knew it was over.

 

He was all up for driving there and giving me a lift and acting like things were fine so I took the lift, slept all the way there and planned other similar tactics of avoidance once there. I thought I’d just potter off and get lost in the crowds. He wasn’t so easy to shake though. It took him hours to finally say he fancied seeing something he didn’t think I’d like and wandering off in the other direction.

 

I found the furthest away corner and went for a long walk among the trees, where none of the fun was happening. I saw a group of people open water swimming and got chatting and generally just soaked up the lovely day. I eventually got back into the foray of people and book stalls and performances and fun and watched an old work colleague doing performance poetry. Here, I had solace. Should the gentleman wander along and want to sit down, I could say I was busily engaged in supporting my friend and paying attention to his performance and apologies but I wasn’t able to have a chat right now. The gentleman did not appear though and the next performer was hilarious so I stayed there. At one of the food stands nearby, I ordered an amazing portobello mushroom burger with halloumi cheese and red pepper. I sat down with my burger, deep in thoughts about life and this tasty mushroom burger. It was such a great moment, there, sitting on the ground, with people milling about, books in hands, intelligent discussion being had all around me, a performer on a little stage not far away and these beautiful purple flowers lining a little garden wall to my left.

 

That’s when the gentleman came along, greeted me in surprise and sat down next to me, ruining my moment. My excuses for silence were none, apart from the tasty mushroom burger in my hands, which required all of my attention. We were stuck together again then, for the rest of the afternoon, until it all became too painfully obvious and, in a quiet late afternoon moment, sitting on the grass, he fell asleep and I sneaked away, got my bag and headed for the nearest main road to find a train station and scarper off back home, away from this awful awkwardness that I should never have embarked upon in the first place.

Espresso, ice cream and truffles

…not all together!

We started yesterday morning by walking to the end of our road, where the Colossuem is. See it there at the bottom?

We picked up some fairly pricey, but tasty, breakfast over the road from the Colossuem and sat marvelling at it’s size. At the bottom of our road, before you cross the road to the Colossuem, is a gladiator training ground. There was an underground passage for the gladiators to go direct from their training ground, to the rooms and corridors under the floor of the Colossuem. The emperor also used this corridor to get into the Colossuem to avoid the crowds in the piazza.

We then pottered over to the Roman Forum area where there were once lots of temples and senate buildings. It's amazing to think, as you wander past the little kiosks with their bunches of fruit and slices of coconut for sale, that thousands of years ago, the men and women who would shape our world were swishing about (swishing? did the Romans 'swish'?) in their robes, discussing points of law and bathing.

The world of two thousand years ago and the world of today coexist surprisingly well in Rome. Sometimes you forget the gravity of what you are seeing, the magnitude of these ruins and their importance, because the local Italians are going about their business as usual. Buses and trams snake around the edge of the Colossuem and life goes on as usual for the policemen hanging out by their cars in the Piazza del Rotondo, which houses the Pantheon.

On our way to the Pantheon, we happened across the Campo Di Fiore, an amazing market, selling everything that you imagine to be quintessentially Italian.

I found a man doing tasters of white truffle butter with crackers and was transported back a few weeks ago to my amazing truffle experience in London. Danda turned up his nose at this heart-stoppingly beautiful truffle butter and located instead some humorous pasta shapes.

Shortly after this, we were in the Piazza Navona, admiring street painters and debating which of the many gelatarias to buy our ice cream from.

We decided on one and asked the guy behind the counter which flavour was the best. He pointed out an illuminous blue one and when I looked closely at the flavour on the label it said Viagra! Viagra flavoured ice cream! Hilarious. Surprisingly, I opted for something else. Pistachio. It was amazing.

The fountain in the Piazza Navona is huge and impressive. In fact, everything in Rome is huge and impressive. They seem to take the original plans of the building before they start it, zoom it by at least 200%, THEN build it.

Every time we came across a huge building front, we’d scramble for the map, to see what it was. It would usually turn out to just be a regular church or something. They’re all like that. If the Romans were trying to intimidate by showing off about how much power they had with the size of their buildings, then it has worked. I am intimidated.

Next we found the Pantheon and went inside for half an hour or so, soaking up the atmosphere.

It is a beautiful building, well preserved as it has been in use the entire time up to the present day. Often, buildings like the Colossuem were abandoned, ransacked, left to the elements, then given new life as a tourist attraction, which means a lot of work needs doing on them. The Pantheon is still pretty much as it was when it was built. I kept running my hands over the huge columns and thinking how thousands of years ago, someone else was probably running their hands over the same spot, admiring their size.

Next, we were on a mission to find coffee. I had read that the Tazza D’Oro did the best coffee in Rome and, as a non-coffee drinker, thought this might be the thing to change my mind. We dawdled about, trying to catch the barista’s eye, feeling a bit awkward and getting ignored. Danda suddenly remembered that you have to go to the till and pay, then get a receipt and bring your receipt to the barista and he makes your coffee. No wonder he was ignoring us, we didn’t have a receipt. Without further ado, we paid and got our coffees.

It was bitter… And strong…. And quite small. And I think it was tasty. I couldn’t say for certain. But I think it was tasty. This was a step in the right direction!

Soon after, we realised our legs were about to give out and we headed back to our apartment on the Gay Street of Rome. On our way, we stopped for dinner in one of the little family run restaurants which has seating on the pavement outside. I ordered a pasta dish with porcini mushrooms and a hint of tartufo. It was delicious. Simple and delicious.

On the way back, we visited the shop which provided us with the tasty wraps the night before and I got a cannolo almost the same size as myself.

With no shame at all, I scoffed it down and wondered aloud if there weren’t another to be found close by. Danda shook his head in disbelief and banned me from going and getting another one…..