Day 21 to 22 Start walking.

Train and taxi take us to a small village, Mornico Losana, where we are staying in an “Agriturismo”, a self-explanatory word. We are now at the northern edge of the hills of Liguria and will be walking south to the coast.

Cultural note: Salami.
It is no use coming to this part of Italy if you are averse to dried pig-meat. Absolutely no point if you are a vegetarian (if so, go somewhere less remote). Every meal for the next week starts with a plate of charcuterie. Barbara happened to get an email with “The 20 most nutritious foods” listed – pig fat came eigth from the top. Apparently it has good cholesterol in it as well as numerous vitamins, minerals and stuff like that. Result! Tuck in!

Tonight’s charcuterie plate is half a dozen slices of the farm’s home-made salami – it is delicious. Then pasta etc. I make the mistake of asking for red wine.

Cultural note: Wine.
Almost all the wine made here is fizzy “Frizzante”, (Asti is close by). Fizzy red is a bit strange. The fizzy white is all great. so I ask for white wine from now on.

And next morning off we go along small roads and farm tracks into rolling dry hills. There has been drought here for months, it is hot too.

Much time is spent trying to photograph uncooperative butterflies.

There are lots of butterflies, much time is spent photographing them.

Mostly unsuccessfully, there is a type of brown and white butterfly doing a mating display involving two butterflies kind of hugging eachother, eventually I get some video of this …

Five or six hours of hot walking through low hills and we get to our second farmhouse B&B stopover. The farmer here moved to the country from Milan some years ago, he grows Lavender, obtaining about 2.5 litres of lavender oil per year usually, this year it is one litre, due to the drought. When we mention the upcoming election he is rather down on Italy in general, he feels Italians are unambitious and disorganised, also tax is too high for normal people, the rich ignore the rules. Sounds like a good country for Boris.

He has wine from a local producer who owns no vines, but buys the best grapes he can each year. The wine is white, fizzy, grown from black grapes, they remove the skins to make whtie wine, leave them in for red.