6. And it shines!

To celebrate the fine weather that graced us on Satruday, today's featured sunglasses are something a little special, they're the Black Rim Star sold by Luxurydivas.com at just $4! It's amazing what bargains you can find online.

So Saturday came and my wish for sun and hot weather was finally fulfilled. After a winter of weathery discontent, a real scorcher was delivered, and not on a school day but on a Saturday. Unbelievable. Getting my pack lunch of a few beers, some prosciutto and some cheese together, I set of to the royal Bourbon Palace. The Palazzo Reale is the largest palace in Europe and was commissioned by King Charles VII. I’m not saying he had an ego problem or anything, but he really went out of his way to out-do Versailles commissioning the largest building in 18th century Europe. I mean, what are you going to do with 1,200 rooms? I live in a five bedroom flat (including bathroom and kitchen) with my brother and that works well enough although it can be a little bit close when having visitors, but really, how many family members did this guy think he was going to have to put up at Christmas? The clue to the size, might be in their girth as I soon discovered.

I did a little internet research into these Bourbon sorts and found out some interesting gems. It might not come as much of a surprise, but did you know that the only reason they came to power was owing to the discovery and import of Chocolate in the 16th century? The story goes that once they started importing the foreign delicacy, the Italian elite couldn’t get enough of it and started to pay through the nose for any chocolate they could. The master stroke came when [soon to be] Charles V married one of the local royals who had a sideline in biscuits. It’s from this that the famous Bourbon biscuit was born (the advent of the Garibaldi biscuit is another, but separate biscuit episode in Italian history, as is the Nice biscuit, which as you know hails from France and is also quite nice with tea). Anyway, marriage and wealth led to the throne and then the palace you see pictured. The current biscuit design is a representation of this very palace, with each of the little holes / dimples on the biscuit representing some of the 1,790 windows in the Bourbon family ‘jewel in the crown’. Wonderful thing the internet.

His son, Fatty ‘who ate all the biscuits’ Ferdinando II (the subject of a later ABBA song) was even more ill at ease with himself, leading to the adaptation of the throne room into the modest chamber you see pictured. His wife wasn’t too much better on the size front either, eating rather too many biscuits than might be considered healthy. Here you can see a ceiling representation of the slim-line queen looking at her reflection in a biscuit tin lid, the slightly concave shape of the lid making her seem a little on the slimmer side in the reflection [click on it to make it bigger] – an early day ‘house of mirrors’ you might say. Or maybe not.

So here I was, enjoying the sun and the great gardens of the palace, which can only really be described as ‘palatial’. I felt like Dan Cruikshank going ‘around the world in 80 gardens’ (see BBC TV) taking in the splendours of the intricate water features and sculptures that adorn the 2-km long vista. Quite the ticket in the sun, I can tell you. My picnic was a welcome break at the halfway stage and beers and heat even necessitated a little snooze – even more the ticket.

And so we have the Saturday – a joy to relax and forget about the week’s examining. And then came Naples in the evening. Naples, Naples, Naples [said in growing exasperation].