It has been 15 years since I bought my small apartment in the Veneto, and even longer since my love affair with Italy began.

As a typical English family, we had always taken our summer holidays in France. We enjoyed speaking the language after learning it at school, and we loved exploring, discovering old spa towns with their grand architecture, gracious parks, and thermal establishments. 

However, after a decade, we felt that we had exhausted the idea of taking the waters from Evian to Vichy and took the plunge (almost literally) the following year driving over the Alps and