Environs

As I said before, D. warned us that the most interesting thing about staying at the Villa Saraceno would be the villa itself; the surrounding countryside was flat and uninteresting. We'd probably want to visit Vicenza, and maybe make the longer journey to Venice, but other than that, bring plenty to read.

I don't need to be told to bring plenty to read - but I didn't get through half of it: there was just so much to see!

For one thing, although the villa is on the plain, the flatlands are framed to the east and west by hills. For another, the plain lush and green, criss-crossed by drainage ditches that are more like miniature canals. And for a third, there was always something to see. I took the picture above when I walked out after the heavy rain of D's birthday, just for a breath of air before the rigours of a genuine Italian birthday dinner and to have a look at the "other" Villa Saraceno (the two brothers had each built a new house, but 'ours' had commissioned something in the modern taste from Palladio, while his brother, just down the road, had built in the traditional style). A little further on the road veered right along the canal, while an unmetalled lane went straight ahead over a bridge. I could happily have followed either of them, but it was time to go home.

Touring by car a little further afield, it was the same thing. Setting out on Monday to explore the hills to the north and west of us, the Colli Berici, we paused to do a little shopping in Noventa Vicentina, just because it was the nearest town - and discovered in the centre a majestic square, complete with war memrial, shady arcades and at one end a massive villa which is now the town hall (and when we peered in through the window to admire the frescoes, the staff came bustling out to show us round. durham_rambler and I were very glad we had the party's official Italian speaker with us). The road into the hills crossed a wine route (which runs around the lower slopes, where the vineyards are - later, in Vicenza, I bought a book about wine tourism in the area which would have been helpful, and on another occasion, I suppose, still might be) but we carried on uphill, through woodland to hilltops dotted with little villages and dramatic new churches in unlikely colours.

The following day we headed east, into the Euganean hills, to visit the little town of Arquà Petrarca. But first we had to stop, barely a mile from home, at the unexpected sight of a castle (which turned out to be the Castle of Valbona, a genuine medieval castle but also a pizzeria - though we never did go back there for a pizza). Then on to Arquà Petrarca and the house from which it takes its name, in which the poet Petrarch lived at the end of his life (and I was well-behaved and obeyed the injunction not to take photographs - well, just one, of the view of the hills, so I can't show you the chair in which Petrarch may have sat to write, nor yet the mummified cat which may once have been his cat). On the way home, we stopped to shop for dinner - and I'm always interested in foreign supermarkets: look! red chicory! - and to check that I hadn't imagined the tomato-soup orange villa i was sure I'd seen on the way out.

But for every place we stopped there was somewhere we would have liked to explore but didn't - an interesting church or a walled town or a signpost declaring that this municipality was a producer of olive oil. Not dull at all, in fact.