05 Jul 06
From Gdansk, with its mournful memorial to those striking shipyard workers who died during the Solidarity revolution, we head south past the medieval Malbork Castle, the world's largest brick-built fortress.
Now there are long, 350+-mile days to reach Wroclaw via Torun - home to Copernicus, father of modern astronomy - and to Carnuntum in Austria, diverting to Olomouc with its baroque fountains and Austerlitz, where Napoleon enjoyed his greatest victory.
Once home to upwards of 100,000 people Carnuntum was a garrison city that controlled the Danube and was a gateway to the north, south, east and west of the empire, and was the fourth largest Roman city north of the Alps. Today you can wander round the small percentage that's excavated and visit the world's only facsimile Roman villa built using traditional techniques and materials, with its working central heating, fires and fully furnished as it would have been all those millennia ago.
Then it's into Hungary and Sopron, where Liszt gave his first recital, before reaching Szombathely Savara, founded in 43 AD by the Claudia Caesar legion, where there's a stretch of the original Roman amber road.
Beyond Ptuj with its history stretching back 2,000 years and on to Ljubljana and its famous series of bridges, such as the Dragon bridge, linking the two halves of the town and a lengthy stretch of Roman wall, before dropping down into Italy and Aquileia, east of Venice.
