Some days, despite all our best plans, don’t turn out quite the way we expect them to. Today was one of those days.

We packed Basil up ready for our move from the campsite, which we have decided on balance would have been a jolly nice place to spend a few days if the weather had been a little warmer. Having packed up Basil now on several hundred occasions we now have it down to a fine art. We have made many mistakes along the way, like the time I drove off with the electric still plugged in, to name but one! The result is that we now have a long check list we run through before we set off.

Basil was on the road by late morning with only a supposed one hour to Gubbio, our destination, which we thought would let us have plenty of time for looking round in the afternoon. You may have noticed it is more than a week since the word LIDL occurred in this blog and so we programmed in a stop in Perugia. The shopping took a little longer than usual due to the apparent policy in France and Italy of not opening extra checkouts despite enormous queues.

Back on the road we then hit traffic jams around Perugia followed by a cripplingly slow 31mph speed limit for much of the remainder of our journey. Nonetheless we arrived at a lovely aire in Gubbio (43.351102, 12.564465 €5 with services even electricity at an extra cost) in time for a late lunch. Unfortunately Sarah had developed a headache and after an hour to wait for it to clear we decided we would leave Gubbio until tomorrow.

I had identified that there was a Roman Amphitheatre fairly nearby so I nipped out on my own to investigate. The Amphitheatre is set in a huge park and and behind it, uninterrupted by any other structures the spectacular medieval town of Gubbio all constructed from a single coloured stone sprawls up a mountainside.

I found a small museum adjacent to the Amphitheatre and coughed up €3 for a combined ticket. The museum was marginally interesting being built on top of an old Roman house, so as you moved around you walked on a floor constructed as a metal trellis underneath which you could see the remains of the house. In a couple of rooms mosaics had been left exposed, although I have to admit they were not particularly spectacular compared to some we have seen.

The cabinets were full of a wide spectrum of artefacts recovered from various digs in Gubbio and the museum walls contained some more impressive mosaics which had been collected from around the town.

The museum also explained the history of Gubbio, being populated by the Umbrians prior to being peacefully incorporated into the Roman empire. Apparently the Umbrians were an ancient people of Italy who lived separately from the Etruscans but at the same time. Both the Etruscans and the Umbrians had a written language which was similar to each other and in which they wrote from right to left. There were a few small examples of their script which had been recovered on fragments of pottery.

I was the only person looking round the Amphitheatre, which was large even by Roman standards, capable of seating about 6,000. Unfortunately the seating had largely been taken over by grass although the steps had been kept clear and so it was still possible for me to climb to the top and look down into arena’s centre.

Gubbio looks stunning from a distance so we are looking forward to exploring it tomorrow. Our Rough Guide says that it is probably now the finest medieval town in Umbria, Assisi having been spoiled by over commercialisation. We are visiting Assisi next so we can make our own judgement.