Padua

Packed up and hit the road, heading eastwards again on the last phase of our road trip across northern Italy. First destination was the small city of Padua (or Padova in Italian), where they have the world's oldest botanic garden, founded in 1545. Found a park with a bit of difficulty (lots of one-way streets and trams to worry about), then headed over to the gardens.

Quite interesting, as the intention was to categorise the entire plant kingdom. They'd done this by category, eg medicinal plants, herbs, poisonous plants etc. I think the attempts pre-date later taxonomy work that we're more familiar with. There was also a palm tree from the 1580s that had inspired Goethe in some of his scientific work (related to the structure of leaves and how they were basically structured in the same way regardless of plant, so they must have a common ancestor). Something a bit different for a UNESCO site, but it was fairly small and the weather wasn't great so we didn't stay too long.

By now it was around 2pm and raining fairly heavily, so we didn't particularly feel like searching for somewhere specific to eat, particularly since we weren't in the centre of town and didn't really need to stay in Padua anyway. So in the end we opted for Maccas. Annoyingly the restaurant we went to didn't have self-service touchscreens for ordering (a first on this trip!), and the menu didn't have any special localised options either unlike basically everywhere else, so it was regular menu items all the way down. After the pantomime of ordering, of course.

Back in the car where we drove north-west to Vicenza, where we'll spend the next two nights. Our apartment was available from 3pm so we checked in basically at that time. It's a single-bedroom apartment, obviously someone's home and so it feels very cluttered. Kitchen stinks as well, because there's two mouldy sponges sitting in the sink and soaking wet. Plus the dregs of coffee in the filter machine - gross. At least it was cheap!

We spent the rest of the day staying in and working, as it'll be another busy one tomorrow.Read more