The overnight rain had stopped by about 6:45 am and the skies cleared during the next few hours. After a slow and filling breakfast, we prepared to go out; on today's agenda was Varenna old town and Villa Monastero, the botanical gardens. We retraced our steps from yesterday evening along and reached a small area with shops - either restaurants or craft shops. Instead of turning back as I did yesterday evening, we continued on through a series of cobbled alleys. Although we seemed to be walking forever, I was sure that we were very close to the villa. I also discovered that we were walking parallel to the main road in the 'city centre' of Varenna. Instead of carrying on walking along the cobbled alleys parallel to the lake, we took a left turn and walked up an alleyway that led us to the main road.
The sign 'The botanical gardens' was almost in front of us, but a little research from this morning revealed that this was a false flag operation: these botanical gardens actually belong to a hotel. I quote The hotel has a sign on the street indicating ‘villa botanical gardens’. If you are walking to Villa Monastero from the Varenna town center, you will pass here first. Some people don’t realize that this is another villa and another garden and walk inside, pay a hefty fee, and are then disappointed that the garden wasn’t as nice as they expected. So we walked on another 100m and the entrance to Villa Monastero was in front of us; entrance fee was 7€ each. Most of the gardens was very interesting, especially to gardeners like my wife. There were many varieties of palm and cypress trees on view, as well as small seasonal plants that add colour and fill in the space.
Once inside the gardens I discovered that the battery of my mobile phone had run out, even though I charged it overnight. I think that this was due to the poor wi-fi connection in our room and that the device had used up most of its battery trying to improve the connection. This was a minor inconvenience (apart from anything else, all the walking would not be measured), but more inconveniently, I discovered that my video camera had also died. I had used it a little bit during a walk, but now I couldn't even turn it on. I don't think that this is due to a battery failing, as the camera won't work even when connected to its charger. At least no filmed videos will have been lost as what is filmed is stored on an SD card, but it is very annoying. The importance of my mobile phone as camera now assumes a greater importance.
Walking around the gardens had made us somewhat weary, so after we had seen enough, we walked back to the entrance and from there to the town centre. There were various restaurants open; the first that I checked (that was not the first that I saw) had our fall-back spaghetti al pomodoro, so we ate this along with tea. While we were waiting for the meal to be delivered, we saw that the skies were darkening and shortly it began to rain: shades of Ostuni from two years ago. This time no umbrella seller emerged from nowhere. At least we were somewhat prepared: my wife had bought a small folding umbrella from a stall in the morning and I had brought with me a full size thin raincoat from Temu. We waited until the rain stopped, walked down an alleyway and found ourselves back in 'the small area with shops'. The rain returned so I put on the raincoat that did its work (although my bag prevented closing the coat below the waist). We walked back through the Passegiatta degli innamorati (aka the promenade) and into the hotel.
Blogger tip: I have noticed that pictures uploaded don't have a right border and so my text butts against them. This can easily be fixed by using the following tip: in the HTML code, there will appear 'margin-left: 1em;' . Changing the 'left' to 'right' will cause the picture to be aligned to the left margin and will add a small margin between the picture and the text.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 836 | Vinyl log 8 - 1 May | Vinyl log, Peter Hammill, Steeleye Span | |
| 1613 | Erythritol - continuing the story | Food science, Erythritol |
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