Ahh the fair city of Verona… For this stopover, we decided to stay in a city camping.

Benefits:

• close to everything
• very cheap
• no dealing with camping staff who want to know EVERYTHING

Disadvantages (top ones):

• no facilities bar a hose
• high concentration of other campers (although to be fair they were in the same predicament so not too pesky)
• cockroaches!

Our sightseeing started at approximately 5:30am as we thought we’d beat the crowds and get to see the beautiful morning sunrise light…Verona was incredibly beautiful, with gorgeous piazzas, views over the river Adige, remains of the old Roman theatre + archeological museum, churches and basilicas. You may have heard that Italians don’t hold back on churches but the ones we’ve seen in Verona were hands down the most beautiful. The Basilica of San Zeno and the Church of Santa Anastasia deserve a special mention.

So the early start had some obvious benefits as at one point it felt like we had the city to ourselves. The drawback was waiting at 7.55am at the door of a café to get a breakfast that involved eggs (very hard to find in any Italian city!). The town started to fill up with coaches of tourists in the late morning but we were determined to see Casa di Guiletta (not the real one but the pretend real one…) which was terribly busy and really spoilt the mood. To add to that, we had one of the worst meals in the history of food at the Piazza delle Erbe (shame on you, you know who you are). Top tip: in Italy, do not eat at any of the food outlets near the main attractions. After that monumental fiasco, we could not have been consoled even with pastries from the local patisserie so we boarded Murphy in a huff and headed for the sanctity of the countryside.

In an incredible strike of luck, we stumbled across an agri-camping in a vineyard, a stone’s throw away from Lake Garda. We stayed there for a few nights, taking in the lovely views, enjoying a great pool and our outdoor gym comprised of lanes upon lane of vineyards and orchards.

We headed for Lake Garda one fine morning but unable to find anywhere that we liked, we went on to walk around Limoncino  – which (as you may gather from the name) used to be famous for its farming of lemons. Lake Garda was very touristy so it was time to go back to the mountains. We enjoyed a day of driving through windy roads of Dolomites for the rest of the day, drinking in the incredible views (including snow) but found ourselves somewhere very high up with the mercury showing only 17C…with rain. That sounded too much like England so we pushed on past another of the big Italian lakes – Iseo (and caught a final glimpse of the floating piers installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude). In the evening, we found ourselves in Brescia, where our guidebook recommended a family-run hotel with an incredible view of the castle and top facilities – we were sold. Another day, another city. Such is the life of a traveller.