The San Siro stadium is the home ground of the Italian football club AC Milan and with over 80,000 capacity, it’s one of the largest in Europe and the largest in Italy.

Well…I don’t have any kinship ties to Italy…but every year when our boys were school age, we loaded up the car on the first day of summer holidays and headed across the channel to France…and then onwards all around continental Europe. We always found the Italians the most friendly of all the nations..and the food, wine, scenery, history etc, just the best somehow. We took different routes to take in new territory each year but regardless of how we got there we always ended up in a little seaside town called Palnuro in Campania down the south west side of Italy and stayed put there for around a week. The first year we found it by chance and booked into a small hotel which was built on top of the remains of a Saracen castle. The owner turned out to be a retired deep-sea coral diver who my husband & I struck up a lifelong friendship with because my husband was also a diver (although not a professional). Luigi lived in Rome most of the year, but he and his wife Monique, who was French, spent the summer months running the hotel and organising diving trips. I loved everything about that place, including visits down into his wine cellar which was in the old dungeon of the castle and the food which was so fresh it was alive or growing just minutes before being prepared by his chef specially for us. The boys loved the beach right in front of the hotel accessed via a tunnel under the road and we bought them bikes which we left behind until the next time so they could explore the area themselves. It actually seems like some idyll from a different lifetime now looking back on it. Sadly Luigi died of a missive heart attack a number of years ago, but my son has such fond memories of our visits that he took his own wife and boys back a couple of years ago…but sadly the hotel had changed ownership and the enchantment was broken. They say never go back and try to recapture great memories as you’ll always be disappointed …I’m afraid that’s more than likely true.