We ate last night at an old converted post office. It was more upmarket than the pub we ate at the night before , but still mostly for locals.
Of note, the waitress brought us the menus in French at first, a combination of my strangely accented Italian and stylish dressing, I expect. Simon continued eating his way around the animal kingdom, this time with bunny rabbit. Actually I tried a bit and it was very nice, much more delicious than my hazelnut, lemon, anchovy spaghetti.
Today we were aiming for an undemanding time for our last full day in Italy, so again it was late morning by the time we headed down the hill to the wharf. The boat timetables are incredibly complicated, going between a number of towns and sites of interest on the shores of Lake Maggiore as well as several of the little islands. Our aim was to visit the two most famous islands today, Isola Madre and Isola Bella. Both have elaborate gardens and palaces, and both are owned by the same Borromeo family who also own the castle we visited yesterday. We spent a couple of hours at each island, following the audio guides on our earpods, the only ones we could see who were doing so. Everything was fabulous and incredible, of course, but the main thing that blew my mind was that I visited these islands 15 years ago with my oldest daughter and I remember nothing about it apart from maybe the peacocks. That’s not dementia, because usually your long term memories are retained pretty well, so I can only imagine I just wasn’t paying attention the first time. Who knows? I must ask my daughter what she remembers. There are a lot of details stuck in my mind about that group tour of Italy we did, but these islands are not amongst them.
