Our original plan (the one we made up in spain) was to sleep in a camping of Marghera the night of the 4th august. Marguera is just an industrial village just outside venezia, and the camping (www.plusvillages.com) looked fine to us. Why? well, it was close enough of every place we wanted to visit: close to Padova at the west, close to treviso at north and on the way to see Ferrara and Bologna, to the south.

But our day in Vicenza (see last post) was intense and we wanted to go back to enjoy more of this incredebly discovering, so we drove back to the west, saying goodbye to Padua and the other places for now. Anyway, there was another reason to sleep at the doors of Venezia: Il canal di Brenta.

 Centuries ago, when Venezia was rich and powerful, the nobles used to leave their beautiful city during summer to avoid the extreme heat and unstandable odours. So they went through the river Brenta with their ships and builded extraordinary villas on its shores, close enough to go back to Venezia, but FAR enough to organice their orgies and parties without any inconveniences. Casanova, Byron and other distinguished tourists did the rest to boost the legend of the place.

The road from Venezia to Padova runs beside this extraordinary scenery, so the car is the best option to enjoy it. You can drive and stop every time you see a magnificent villa and, trust me, you will stop a lot of times. Also, the road crosses some beautiful and small villages (as Dolo and Mira from which I took the name to place this day in travbuddy map). Seriously, this is a MUST to see in your journey to italy. I only wish I had more time to stop and visit every villa and palace we found, because every one was incredible. This road of the Canal was one of the Highlights of the trip.

Back to Vicenza we made some museums: we saw Civic Museum, inside Chiarecatti palace, and the palace Leoni Montanari, the best one because of the breathless barocque decorations. and incredible masterpiece not well known for the rest of the tourists.

On the evening we went down to have a quick visit to Parma and Modena. Distances in Italy are not too high, so we took the highway (paying, as usual in this country) to take advantage of our time)