There's nothing quite like a visit to the continent to put a lot of things back home into sharper focus. Driving through Italy and France has become slightly more of a pleasure than ever before, since now there's no need to share your holiday money with a series of banks and bureaux de change. God bless the euro, I found myself chanting like a mantra at several borders. As never before we can make price comparisons, since everything is priced in the same currency and you don't need a mind like a calculator to notice the differences. After France and Italy you begin to realise what an advantage it is to be an Irish holiday-maker: everything you want to buy is cheaper than it is here, some things by huge margins, so everything seems like a bargain. But before I get too carried away with eulogies to continental prices, I'll limit myself to hotels and restaurants.

Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, and a short stay in the Cote D'Azure confirmed one. It's possible to eat very expensively in France as well as cheaply. You could do as I did and enjoy a lunch-time cheeseburger in the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat, in an exquisite dining room set by the edge of the infinity pool, where a simple dish like that costs €45. It's almost admirable the way the French can rob you blind in chic hotels and at the same time be snotty while they do it. They're almost defying you to say 'What? Forty-five euros for a burger? You've gotta be kidding', thus showing yourself to be some hopeless pleb who's stumbled out of their depth. But this minor excess apart, continental good food and wine is a bargain by our standards.

I'd only been in Italy a couple of days when an old friend called Sergio came to visit and suggested that my wife and I might join him for a meal. The three of us set out for Atina, a town with an immensely long history, founded as it was some 1,000 years before Rome. Not much remains of its former grandeur, it's now a small provincial town of about five thousand inhabitants, but in the old town a new restaurant had opened called 'Nelson Club'. Why this Anglo-Saxon name was chosen I can't tell, but it's set in the cantina, or basement, of an old palazzo. What was remarkable about it was that everything on the menu was home produced, from the vegetables to the chickens, the rabbits, and if they hadn't actually produced it they'd gathered it. Mushrooms and orapi, a kind of wild, bitter green, had all been picked from the high mountains. Obviously having wonderful ingredients isn't much use if you can't cook them properly, but here the preparation was simple but perfect. We enjoyed the antipasto to begin - the Italian hors d'oeuvre - went on to eat to eat pasta cooked with the wild orapi, then ate rabbit, baked cheese and a steak for main courses and finished with a couple of ice-creams. Two litres of their own wine accompanied the food plus a couple of bottles of mineral water. Coffees and grappas all round and then we got our bill for €50.

I was thinking that this was fairly remarkable - eating well and cheaply - but a couple of weeks later we had a return date, this time in Sergio's home of Arpino, an elegant town of stone and Travertine marble. This time the venue was 'La Perla', which is set on a hill-top outside Arpino's centre in a hamlet called Collecarino. La Perla is famed for its antipasto, and in my opinion justifiably. Apart from the usual offerings of Parma ham and melon there was home-made cured sausage, crostini with truffles, deep-fried cheese parcels, fresh sardines, several salads, mozzarella, roasted vegetables in olive oil and rice-balls to list a few of the fifteen various tastes that were placed before us. Lesser appetites might have surrendered after that, but we went on to eat pasta and then main courses. The bill, which included the wine, mineral water, coffees and limoncellos came €50.70.

Okay, I hear you say, so much for restaurants in small provincial towns, but can this be true of Milan or Rome? It can, but not in the city centres. And yet, a little later we were in Volterra, one of those absurdly beautiful Tuscan towns that just happened to be in the middle of its annual mediaeval festival when we got there with friends Mario and Floriana. Years of picking restaurants on spec have left me wary of places that have big credit card signs outside, but Volterra was so crowded that our only chance of food was in 'La Tavernetta'. A high, vaulted ceiling was frescoed by the hand of a minor master and despite their being very busy we were served promptly and well. Game is the speciality in Volterra, and a truly impressive meal came to us replete with wild boar, quail, partridge and venison. The wild mushroom and truffle pasta was extraordinarily good, and once we'd switched from a nondescript Vernaccia di San Gimignano to a jug of their house white, the meal was perfectly balanced. We pushed the boat out a bit here, since this was my thank-you to Mario and Floriana for their hospitality, but even so the bill for the four of us just broke the €100 barrier, including a service charge.

There's no doubt that the high taxes and duties on wine here contribute to our high restaurant prices, but why the food element should cost so much in Ireland I've yet to discover. In the interests of research, any thoughts or theories on this would be gratefully received, so let me know what you think.