Day 10: Fa così bello oggi!

It's always a beautiful day when we get to start it by doing some yoga. We are so lucky because our room here in Bellagio is a actually large enough for both of us to practice in the morning.

And the weather was also gorgeous again today, as you can see here in this pic of Pete on the ferry across the lake to Tremezzo.

Tremezzo is home to this large and wonderful villa, Villa Carlotta. We toured the interior (but couldn't take pictures) that was filled with sculptures, friezes, paintings, frescoes, and tapestries. It's amazing that someone had enough wealth to build such a large building used only a few months of the year and filled it with beautiful art.

The gardens were also very lovely. Kristina is standing in front of one of the villa's vertical gardens.

This is a picture of the grand stairway leading to the villa's front door taken from the balcony of the second floor.

After the villa, we took another ferry across Lake Como to the town of Varenna.

From the ferry landing we walked along the waterfront and then headed up to the piazza and toured the church. You can see it's clock tower in the previous photo. As you can imagine in a town nestled in a hillside like this, almost all paths are stairs. After our heavenly pastime, we had some delicious pizza with olives (left whole), anchovies, capers, and tomatoes.

This is just one of the many beautiful homes here along the banks of Lake Como. This particular house is in Varenna.

Dinner in Italy starts a bit later than we are used to, with most Italians eating around 8:30. We've adjusted and are enjoying our evening meals. Tonight we had an especially delicious dinner at Far Out. We started with mussel and bean soup in a tomato broth. we followed that with pasta: spaghetti with a spicy salami and hot peppers with tomatoes; and fettuccine with prawns, small lobsters, and tomatoes. Our second was grigliata, which was a mix of grilled seafood: prawns, calamari, small lobsters, sea bream, and a meaty swordfish-like fish. All of it was perfectly prepared. Pete capped off the evening with a glass of limoncello.