Italy

We had expected Italy to be a real highlight based on previous visits, but were surprised to discover it was quite a mixed bag.

The Po plain is flat, industrial in patches, and car-dominated even through town centres. Some days were genuinely hard: rain and headwinds on the long stretch from Pavia to Mantua, a grim stretch of gravel track next to a water pumping station that sapped Mat's will to live and clouds of sticky, fluffy poplar seeds floating around. There was a lot of heavy freight traffic even on smaller roads and zero hard shoulder; we had to change our route when the lorries flying past in both directions got too hairy.

Italian drivers were the worst of the whole trip, overtaking on blind bends, passing with mere centimetres of room, and shouting at us regularly (I promise we followed the road rules). One morning a driver cut across a roundabout, driving on the wrong side of the road, straight towards Mat. Tractor drivers were even worse.

It didn't help that the weather was cold and grey with thunderstorms. We ended up skipping our last day of cycling to Trieste and spent extra days there waiting out the storms.

On the other side the cities were extraordinary: Turin's majestic porticos and plazas, Cremona with its Stradivarius legacy, Mantua rising out of its lakes, Ferrara the UNESCO jewel, Padua with its ancient frescoes and the oldest botanical garden in the world and Treviso with its gorgeous waterways and back streets. The food and produce were fantastic and cooking with Italian ingredients was a genuine joy. We had our longest day in Italy (103km to Ferrara) - luckily it was a nice sunny day with a tailwind for a change.