We woke up on our 2nd full day in Italy to a thick cloud of fog over the Lombardy countryside.
It’s gotta be said though – Fog, as unwanted as it can be when you’re up for a sunny holiday, certainly has a way of making a place look so dramatic!
Without wasting too much time at breakfast, we hopped back into our rickshaw and carried on in search of more sights of the Lombardy region in Northern Italy!
A couple of hours in, we stopped in a little town we were driving past, for some espressos (that long night of editing this video was starting to catch up with me) before carrying on our journey.
Our main goal today was to get to a town called Pizzighettone this afternoon with our group of merry rickshaw-ers (we had a team from France, one from Germany and another from Italy – we were Team UK)but before long, Lloyd and I took a wrong turn and ended up in the town of Orio Litta – which we had absolutely 0 plans to visit.
Part of travelling across Italy in a rickshaw is embracing moments like this and so with that, we carried on through Orio Litta, looking to still head on to Pizzighettone before we got totally distracted by this amazing villa/castle/mansion/gigantic building in front of us.
We stopped the rickshaw and cheekily peered in, eager to figure out what exactly it was when a guy, staring in the distance walked towards us and muttered something in Italian!
At the time, I thought he was politely telling us to get off his property but it turns out he was inviting us in and told us to drive our rickshaw in.
We very quickly obliged and once we arrived at the entrance of this grand building, we met a lady who turned out to be that guy’s daughter.
She spoke more English than he did (so much better than our non-existent Italian) and told us that this was their family home! You should have seen our jaws drop when she said this – their family home! Someone actually gets to call this place their home! Can you imagine?!
She invited us to have a look around and even head out to the gardens behind which, nosey parkers that we are, happily agreed to!
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you the name of this place – it’s called Villa Litta Carini and is a 17th century noble home.
Wandering around the villa, I can’t tell you how happy I was to have taken a wrong turn in our rickshaw.
Eventually, we said thanked them for their hospitality and said farewell as we head off in search of Pizzighettone again.
Thankfully, Pizzighettone isn’t too far from Orio Litta so before long we arrived at Pizzighettone.
In addition to sounding like the love child of pizza and rigatoni (two meals I would happily have had at that point in time), Pizzighetone is home to an ancient city wall and some rather cute Italian streets.
A visit to Pizzighetone is more of a lazy one – it’s compact enough that you can see it in very little time and a nice little distraction if you’re in the nearby city of Cremona.
For lunch, we went to Da Giacomo where the chef whipped out some absolutely delicious meals for us!
We started off with some complimentary little starters (quail’s eggs, bruschetta, quinoa and goat’s cheese), a bit of Italian sausage (didn’t even know this was a thing before) with lamb covered in breadcrumbs for me, chicken for Torsten, mushrooms for Sascha and rigatoni for Lloyd.
For dessert, we decided to pop into the local gelateria for a few scoops of gelato before hitting the open roads again – thankfully by this point, the sun had come out to play and boy were we happy about that!
Catch ya in the next post!
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