Maiali

An even slower day today! We woke to cloud and some drizzle, and read about the storms elsewhere in Northern Italy including Bologna where we’d thought about going today…we’ll postpone til Saturday. We’d also wondered about going back to Venice today but felt we’d done so much the other day there we wouldn’t bother. So instead we decided to have a day relaxing and set off slowly mid morning and wandered into town (didn’t find the fabric shop though…we’ve passed it every other day so can’t work out what’s going on! We now recognise many parts of the city but can’t stitch them all together so often take wrong turns or know where we want to get to but need the satnav to work out how to get there!)
We managed to find a homeware shop and bought a few small momentos to take home. I got a topper for my olive oil bottle as did K and she also bought some napkins and a very useful tall thin grater. After some other browsing we went for cichetti lunch at a bar our host had recommended (delicious!) and then another delicious ice cream (Dulce de leche for K and a local speciality for me of egg nog, rum and cherries topped with caramelised nuts) as we wandered a bit more around the markets filling the squares in the central area….enjoying the feeling of getting the hang of the place and feeling at home here rather than a tourist since today we didn’t visit any churches or museums etc.
Home, by now it was getting much brighter and after we both had a bit of a crash out for an hour we enjoyed sitting in the garden in the sun reading.
I was pleased to get the news I’ll be joining the PFT Board next year…should be fun with their new Artistic Director!
We then took the sholley down to the local supermarket (we have been amused by it being called Despar) and browsed the things you can’t easily get at home as well as getting the milk etc that we needed before then walking a different direction to our usual route to a restaurant called Gino’s that was in an odd location by a nearly abandoned small airport but served beautiful wood fired grilled food. We shared an enormous steak, with aubergine and individual onion tart tatins, followed by Basque cheesecake with figs and a large single profiterole. Delicious…and lovely staff, beautiful plates (Rak) and lamps on each table. It was getting busy when we left but we were happy to come back and have an early night….