By a Crystal blue Italian stream

20 September

Never under (or over)estimate the size of a city.

Having only truly seen Verona at dusk, we stopped to take another walk through the town centre before leaving for Grappa area.

Verona remains a beautiful city. Somehow, the fact that you have to cross a bridge to enter an old town, makes it that much more mysterious. Ponte Scaligero was built between 1354 and 1376, and when four of its arches were blown up by the Germans in World War II, the Italians dredged the river in order to find all the parts of the bridge, and rebuilt it.

Getting out of Verona was only slightly easier than getting in. And with some detour, we eventually managed to get on our way to Bassano del Grappa. We eventualy figured out that Verona is way smaller than we thought it was, and so when you follow the map, you get way further than you think you did, and therefore constantly overshoot the target.

Our accommodation  in Grappa-country was in a little village, Mason Vicentino, outside Bassano del Grappa, which we did not think was that big in the first place. Finding our accommodation was really easy this time round, and after a brief stop, we set off to see what Grappa-country looks like. The first town we found was Marostica, which I was really sorry that we did not visit a week earlier. Apart from having the most impressive walled historical town centre, Marostica is famous for it's human chess game that only happens every even year in September. It would have been very cool to see this.

Bassano del Grappa is home of - well - Grappa. And has quite a unique wooden bridge that was built to be able to handle the forces of the water flowing down the Brenta river. There is an interesting Grappa museum, but other than that, we found the town almost indifferent to the way Italians preserve their heritage. It just seemed that they only maintain the historical bits because they have to. Perhaps the anticipation of Venice was clouding our judgement, though. And to our surprise, getting out of Bassano was virtually impossible. We wanted to head further east to some other villages, but found it almost impossible to achieve this. Bassano is way bigger than we imagined it....

We eventually did manage to drive through towns like Asolo and Possagna, and on the way back, had to pass through, and get lost in Bassano again, but we are getting quite good at going round circles until we figure things out, and eventually managed to get ourselves back home, And because Mason Vicentino is such a small place, with expectations set fairly low, we found the only fairly decent looking restaurant. Italy never seizes to surprise you. Al Pozzo was by far the most upmarket restaurant we had been to. And somehow, whenever we forget to take our phrase book, we hit restaurants with no English, and no English-speaking people. Sign language and lots of misunderstanding each other somehow ensure for a very good supper.

Size can be very deceiving.