Escaping from prison in Italy

I was thinking of you as I drank Aperol Spritz in icy Venice the other week. Honest.

The locals must have guessed we were English. Who else would sit outside in overcoats drinking it at 5.00PM in mid-winter? I dread to think what gives it the lurid colour. H.I. once said it must be a ghastly food-colouring like 'agent orange'.

I have trouble getting out of prisons.

One year we were in Ostia Antica near Rome, when we visited the castle which dominates one end of the town. We were the only tourists so had a choice of two young women guides who spoke no English. The first thing she did was to escort us across the courtyard and up to a metal door leading to the dungeons.

She opened it and beckoned us to enter. Being an English gentleman, I gestured for her to go before me after H.I. and also being an English gentleman I closed the door behind me. She screamed at the top of her voice in Italian, and I recognised one of the words to be 'idiot'. The door would only open from the outside.

The dungeons were quite a distance from the entrance where her fellow guide had the spare key to let us out, so she began shouting 'MARIA!' at the top of her voice to try to gain her attention. After a while, I handed her my mobile phone but she looked at it disdainfully, pointing at the 10 foot thick walls. It took about half an hour for her colleague to hear her, understand the problem a return with the right key. The atmosphere was somewhat frosty during the rest of the tour.

Last week we visited the Doge's Palace in Venice, and the visit culminated in a trip down to the extensive prisons beneath it. We followed all the signs and eventually found a great maze of stark, stone cells scattered along cramped corridors with low-ceilings.

After about twenty minutes we decided to leave and get out into the fresh air. Twenty minutes later we discovered we had been walking around in circles - some of the nondescript cells began to look familiar. I recognised the graffiti.

I also recognised an English couple who were walking around like us, also trying to find the way out. We wished each other good luck and went in opposite directions. We decided that all we could do was retrace our steps, so eventually found ourselves back in a great hall.

I asked an attendant how to get out, and he said we have to go down to the prisons and over the Bridge of Sighs. I said we had just done that to get here, but he said we must do it again. To me it was like something from Harry Potter, but we went back down and over the bridge once more.

Once over the tiny bridge, I noticed a rope barrier on the other side, so rather than go back down into the prisons again, I hopped over it. I had not realised that the bridge is divided into two - down the middle. It was a two-way bloody bridge...

Casanova was once imprisoned in the Doge's Palace and he managed to escape by climbing over roofs. I never saw any signs for roofs, otherwise I would have done the same thing.