After getting back to Italy, the following few days were spent in a limbo between work and play...Julia had some work to finish and to find a power socket we were forced to trek into the library every day. It was a strange modern building that was a bit like an elongated greenhouse filled with odd overgrown plants and trees and had been built as a complex with the town theatre, but the most interesting thing about this library (I wonder if anyone's personal interest has sustained them this far) was the (wait for it) books.

Now I'm not just being facile here. The Italian province of Bozen-Bolzano is up there with the CAP and the 'not-a-constitution, honest' as one of Europe's all-time political fudges. This thoroughly German-speaking province was promised to the Italians by the British and French in exchange for their entry into the First World War. By the end of the war the province's former owners, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a huge, horribly messy ethnic patchwork of an Austrian-ruled empire in eastern Europe), was in a state of collapse. The winds of change brought an old idea wrapped up in new words to the European sphere, courtesy of the Americans. Self-determination for all people was, in simple terms, the concept that ethnic areas should be free to form their own nations and choose their own forms of government. The principle here was that if everyone lived in a country to which they felt they belonged and were governed as they chose, there would be fewer reasons for conflict within and between nations, and everybody would live happily ever after.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, the promise made to the Italians at the start of the war was the old-fashioned European diplomacy of give-and-take-and-take-some-more, and it didn't sit well with this crazy, liberal, new-world 'can't we all just get along' mumbo-jumbo. Italians had fought and died for three years in one of the most brutal theatres of the war, and Italy wanted her payment – she wanted her 'natural borders' across the middle of the Alps – this is diplomatically equivalent to me saying to my neighbour 'That tree down the end of your garden logically belongs to me because it commands the strategic approaches to my tomato plants.'

International relations being what they are, the Italians got the province, and then proceeded their 50-odd year attempt to make it Italian. I turn to stereotype when I ask you to guess how much success a sporadically repressive Italian government had against a centuries-old German culture. Needless to say, the one church I've been inside only had a German hymnal and the owners of the hotel we're staying in have given us no hint that they speak any Italian.

The heavy-handed nature of the Italians can be characterised by this rather old plaque below...

So what? Well, that someone clearly felt strongly enough to replace the German name of the town with the Italian one on a 13th (?) century monument. Here it is closer below, just to labour the point just a little bit more...

...it isn't entirely ancient history either. Austria only withdrew her international protest at the UN about Italian treatment of ethnic Germans in 1973. OK, that's hardly last year, but it took a long while for the current system to emerge – which grants administration of the region to an autonomous authority based in Bozen-Bolzano, and grants the majority of the province, which is still German-speaking, security that their culture will no longer be systematically attacked by the state.

With the creation of the autonomous region and now open European borders the only reminders in some of the villages that this is not Austria are the post boxes and the Italian half of the road signs. Pretty much all non-official signs are entirely German.

Back to the books...if you remember that far...It's an entirely bi-lingual library. Possibly a bit too much background info for such a small point, but it highlights the slightly weird nature of a region that I keep forgetting is not Austria.

So, back in Sterzing-Vipiteno, we spent a couple of nights in our most secluded camp yet while we sorted out some work Julia needed to finish and got our 3G mobile internet organised. It wasn't great fun (apart from the library, of course) and was compounded by the fact that the day we wanted to set out was the first day of a three-day public holiday (Sunday, nothing opens...Monday, Penticost...Tuesday, Italian Republic Day) and so we were quite heavily laden with food. On top of that it remained to be seen whether we had adequate fitness left in us after a couple of weeks of eating cake and lazing about in Norfolk to make a proper go of it.

I have no shame in saying that it was a great pleasure to me that Julia was feeling unwell and a little down when we started walking, rendering her incapable of resisting a bona-fide pay-for camp-site with attached toilets, showers, and most importantly, pizzeria(!) that night that was perfectly placed as a starting point for our next target – walking over the Jaufenpass.

OK, that's not the pass, that's the Jaufenspitz, but it's only a few hundred meters away and far more dramatic. At 2099m the pass was a lot higher than Brenner (1370), and the way we'd decided to walk it involved a steep climb in the morning followed by a picturesque walk along a high ridge called the Platschjoch that in high summer is teeming with walkers but at this time of year, and in perfect weather, the only sign of recent human activity along the whole route (until we got to a roadside restaurant about 200m from the pass itself) was this...

OK – the rest of this I'll leave to Julia, but I hope you enjoyed my start...Historical sources include my brain, which has been known to be unreliable, and wikipedia, from which this article will lead you further if you are interested, which has a similar reputation. Any general changes to your life's philosophy based on what is written above are entirely your own responsibility.