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Hello, Josh here with the latest instalment.
I guess this is the point where a normal trip to Italy might end, and you leave with memories of fine food and weather, and great experiences. Or you stay, and realise that you're going to need a greater purpose than sightseeing. But without some basic Italian, our understanding of this passionate country is limited and any hope of calling it home for the next couple of months can be forgotten.
With this in mind, we head two hours down the autostrade (one and a half in a normal car) to a walled city called Lucca.
We rattle our way there, increasingly unsure whether the straps holding the bed above the driving cab in place are still working properly, and arrive in time for an afternoon cycle around the city walls. The elevated walls are like a mini m25 encircling Lucca, but open only to cyclists and pedestrians. From the walls you can look down to the city below, or out to the Apennines, which light up orange in the afternoon.
After a while, we stumble upon Lucca Italian School and decide to sign up - with me in particular feeling very apprehensive about the challenge of learning to read, write and speak in Italian. Since the classes don't start for another week, it's on to Il Chianti for some cycling while the weather holds up.
At this point, you might think it's looking cold and autumnal in our photos. But don't be fooled - autumn in Italy is a funny thing. It looks like autumn, with trees shedding their leaves and locals wrapping up in bomber jackets of all shades and styles. But to us it feels like a beautiful summer's day, and our t-shirt and sunglasses wearing gives us away as tourists straight away. As does my continuous failure to cycle on the right side of the road (although most Italian cyclists seem to be struggling with that too...).
Anyway, the Chianti Hills are not called that for nothing, as we learnt on our bikes. With a terrible map, we eventually found the starting point of the next day's cycle - a bridge called Ponte Rotto, that we cycled for a long time just trying to find. Luckily we bumped into a friendly and astonishingly fast-running woman who pointed us in the right direction. After wishing her well on the rest of her run, we embarrassingly failed to leave her far behind. And her terrier-sized dog was something else altogether managing to keep up.
On the right track at last, this was a steep but beautiful ride, passing vineyard after vineyard of autumnal colours. And Katy's cycling proficiency is improving all the time, now including 15% steep gravelly hills.
The following day, with the weather coming in, what else could we do but taste some of the wines from the vineyards we'd cycled through? With tourist numbers dwindling we wondered if they'd be open, but actually this is a great time for wine-tasting in Tuscany - with harvesting done for the year the vineyards have a quiet period and can take time over tours and tastings.
We headed to a fancy looking place we'd seen called Antinori, and you could go to this place for the architecture alone. Set into a hillside lined with row after row of vines, this €180 million structure designed by a Florentine architect was breath-taking. The modern and huge masterpiece rocks the status quo of ageing vineyards set around dilapidated buildings, and we splashed out on a few bottles to keep the food and wine tour of Italy alive.
I wasn't really bothered about our next stop - Florence - but Katy told me we had to go. Let's just say I'm an idiot - it's amazing - and I'll let my more cultured half tell you about it.
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