Cioccolata

I am sitting in the lovely, charming, free-wireless-providing Cafe Au Livre, wading through a cup of hot chocolate. Hot chocolate in Italy is far superior to hot chocolate in the UK, being more like actual melted sludgy chocolate than an actual drink. I'll probably be tasting this one for the next week.

The weather has well and truly turned. Not quite heavy coat weather, but jacket certainly, and I have to remember to stick some gloves and a scarf in my bag if I'm going out on the bike. For hot country dwellers, Italians seem curiously inured to the cooling weather. They still sit outside in the piazza until all hours, while my English friends and I gripe and complain and insist on bars where we can sit inside.

Last Sunday I went to my first Ombra Longa (day celebrating wine), in Treviso. It was an amusing diversion, with a great, warm atmosphere and plenty of wine, but not particularly different from any evening wandering through Padova. I think I'd expected some sort of very civilised wine tasting evening, from the description I was originally enticed by, perhaps with individual small growers offering their wares for sample. Unfortunately my mellow good mood as we left was spoiled by the horrendousness that was trying to catch a connecting train, being shoved and squashed at the doors as people already on the train stood two feet apart from each other ion the carriages and watched us try to embark. En masse, Italians are nowhere near as courteous and polite as English people; not to say they're not sweet and well-mannered individually, but in the street and on public transport they're much ruder and more thoughtless than the public behaviour I'm used to. (Although to be fair I've been told that this is the Veneto, and not necessarily typical of the whole country.)