Words Tim Walker ❚ Pictures Jen Tricker
ROAD TRIPS NORTHERN ITALY
Exploring beautiful northern Italy from the Riviera to Venice… but not without a few hitches
It is time for another European trip. We had been to Italy in our pre-vanlife but never to the north. After an evening of intensive research at home – open bottle of wine, browse our Lonely Planet guidebook, read some magazine articles, Google several lists of best places to visit in northern Italy – we sketch out a rough circuit, anticlockwise, taking in the Italian Riviera, the Cinque Terre, Venice, the Dolomites, Milan and the Lakes; a month in total sandwiched between a week to get there and a week to get back. Here we focus on the section that lasted up until Venice.
More by good luck than good judgment, we had come up with the most stunning of itineraries but, on the trip itself, we spent an inordinate amount of time working out where to stay. We hadn’t reckoned on two things.
First, in Italy, reasonably priced, decent campsites are quite hard to find, and camper stops (aree di sosta) are much more expensive and thinner on the ground compared with France. Secondly, until late September, sites in popular areas tend to be heavily booked and, in October, many shut up shop.
While we don’t like to tie ourselves down by booking in advance, in the future we will invest a bit more time working out a sensible range of camping options for each area before we leave.
Having driven through France and visited a friend in Montpellier, we negotiate the spectacular road from Nice across the top of Monaco and down into Menton, from where it is a short hop across the border to Ventimiglia and the Ligurian coast. Finding nowhere suitable to stay near the sea, we turn our attention inland and discover that the Camping Delle Rose has availability. Sitting in the wooded Nervia valley, with its shaded pitches, mountain views, pleasant bar and restaurant area, swimming pool and friendly staff, it proves to be an absolute gem.
We decide to rest up here for a few days to recover from our French travels and to explore the area. As it happens, the valley is famous for its attractive villages.
As a taster, we walk down to tiny Isolabona, sitting in the valley bottom with an ancient stone footbridge straddling a rock-strewn river. Narrow alleys squeezed between tall buildings and spanned by stone arches above our heads have us cooing with pleasure and yet this little place isn’t on the
