Northern Italy - Caorle and Lago de Como
It´s already been a while since we came back but I still want to tell you about our nice holiday break we had in June.
We spent the first week in Caorle in a beach camp with Jan´s volleyball team. The second week we went for a night to Verona, made a quick stop in Sirmione at Lago di Garda and then continued to Lago di Como where we stayed another four nights.
The camp started on a Sunday and we´d all be meeting in Caorle at the campsite which is 70kms east of Venice. Unfortunately, the Pentecost holidays had just started so the whole South of Germany was moving southwards across the Alps.
We started driving towards the Brenner on Saturday at 6am but that was already too late - at Füssen was already traffic jam and we snaked across the Alps in a slower pace than we would have liked. On the other hand, we had enough time to look at the beautiful scenery and take it all in.
We made a quick stop at Meran which is directly in the Alps but already part of South Tyrol. It´s special because the mountains are towering up over it and it already feels very Southern. We also made an overnight camp stop nearby Trento so we could experience the area of the route better and not just race through in one piece. I´d never crossed the Alps in a car before so this was quite special for me.
Once we had arrived in Caorle, we moved into our mobile homes and made ourselves at home. The volleyball team set off to the beach and started playing and we went for first swims and some laying around in the sun. On the first evening, our party of 35 people went to the campsite´s fantastic pizzeria and enjoyed pizza with buffalo mozzarella and rucket and red and white wine and aperol spritz, which can be seen everywhere, as if it´s Italy´s signature drink. Someone at the Aperol marketing firm must get a big raise for making Aperol neon orange because it can be spotted from a mile away and it makes you want some too.
The next week was spent more or less the same way: the volleyball players set up their nets on the beach and played and us partners or kids of the players did whatever we liked - from lounging in the sun to reading on the terrace of the mobile home to going for a walk into Caorle along the beach. I took part in the animation offers of the campsite (zumba and stretching) and enjoyed the Italien ice creams and coffees. It was a real summer holiday, too, with temperatures ranging between 25 to 32 degrees on most days. I hadn´t had a real summer beach holiday in a while so I was a bit unprepared and hadn´t brought all the beach necessities like beach bags and so but we still managed. Our camping chairs and balcony parasol were already a huge help on the beach.
In the evenings, we cooked together or went to the restaurant (pizza or fish) and sat together outside trying not to be too loud as not to annoy the other families that were close to us in their mobile homes.
On the rainy day some of us took the bus to Venice and we enjoyed walking around there for a bit. It was drizzling nearly the whole time and the marble floor stones were very slippery for my sneakers. I managed not to slip into one of the canals but it was close a few times.
In the afternoon the whole town became very crowded and even though there was so much more to see we went back to our ferry boat to catch our bus back. Sightseeing is always very tiring I find but I had liked the Italian churches (so dramatic and dark!), the tramezzini (so many flavours!) and the panini (so warm and crispy and the mozzarella and pomodoro and salad inside such a good contrast). Also, the city in general is just very interesting with all its canals and old houses.
After seven days there we went for an overnight stop to Verona, the city of Juliet and Romeo. That´s what many other tourists also thought, apparently, and even though it was like 32 degrees it was pretty crowded in the old town. We duly walked around for a bit looking at the admittedly very pretty market place, the towers, the statues, the fountains, the old Roman collosseum that is used for open air opera performances (unfortunately not yet when we were there) and the balcony of the fictitous Juliet from Shakespeare. There´s also a statue of Juliet standing in the courtyard and it seems like touching her boobs brings you luck because they were very shiny.
On the way to Lago de Como we stopped by at Lago di Garda in Sirmione, which is an absolutely stunning place. The water is crystal clear and turquoise and around it the mountains and hills rise up straight behind the water edge. It´s also called the "carribbean of Italy" and I can see why. It was quite crowded, too, and we were glad we weren´t spending much more time there. We had a slice of pizza to go, a quick dip at a public beach, took a boat trip around the islet, and then left again. Other tourists were probably happy that we were leaving again because there was already a queue at the parking lot waiting for the parking spaces to free up.
Our second week we stayed at a campsite in the North of Lake Como. It was a very quiet, nice campsite and we managed to get a shady spot for our tent right at the waterfront so that we could get out of the tent and be in the water in 20 seconds. On the downside, the campsite was located in a bay of the lake and it smelled like fish more or less constantly.
We stayed near Colico Piano in Green Village camping which was close to a kitesurf spot where you can usually kite due to termic winds. We had everything we needed (very nice restaurants with mountain food like "pizzocheri") and spent nice days on the lake (me reading and Jan kiting), hiking around the old villages and on lakeside walking paths and went on a trip to Piano di Erna with a cablecar. Not many mountains around the Lago have cablecars and I didn´t want to risk driving up one with our car so the Piano di Erna it was. We also thought about doing paragliding but the winds weren´t good enough for that so we didn´t do it.
On Friday we set off again to go home and had a nice drive back over the Splugen pass and along Lake Constance.
On the way back we also made a quick stop in Liechtenstein just because we went past it anyway and it was AWESOME because it´s just so CUTE and SMALL and it´s its own kingdom and you feel like you´re in princess diaries.
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| Liechtenstein town hall (the plaza was very bright so we got blinded by the sun) |
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| https://colnect.com/de/postcards/postcard/22308-Liechtenstein_Panorama_Vaduz_Castle_Red_House-Vaduz-Liechtenstein |
Summary of the holiday
I can now order fluently in Italian, I love café americano (yes, sorry), pizzocheri, pizza, tramezzini, piadine, the North Italian lakes, the Italian way of life (life just feels different in summer clothes) and how close it really it to our home (if only it weren´t to the Alps that are in the way and whose streets are often jammed with tourists).
THE END :)
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