Brydon told fans on Twitter that filming will begin “very soon” in Italy, taking in “many and varied locations”.

Series one of the comedy, in which Coogan and Brydon play skewed versions of themselves, aired in 2010 and saw the pair tour high-class restaurants in the Lake District, spending most of their time arguing and competing to do the best celebrity impersonations.

It had long been expected that series two would involve a trip to Italy, with the idea first mooted in 2011.

Coogan also confirmed the project. “We are going to Italy,” he told Empire. “I went there three weeks ago to meet Rob and [director] Michael [Winterbottom] to go for dinner and talk about what we were going to do. What other characters were going to be in it. That’s a bit of research I suppose, but I’m going to have to do some reading.
“We’re supposed to be retracing the footsteps of the Romantics, of Shelley and Byron and Keats, and I don’t know enough about it. I’m damned if Rob’s going to come across as an authority on it. It’ll be a great motivation for me to read up on it so that when we improvise, I can drop some information on him. Sometimes you try to compete with each other in improvisation by using dirty tricks.

“In the first Trip, he asked me to do the eulogy I would give if he was dead. I knew he was doing it because he had one up his sleeve. So as soon as I’d finished mine, I walked off. He fell into my trap by letting me go first, thinking I would generously let him reciprocate, which I didn’t. It wound him up. But that made him angry, and the anger was good.”

Coogan added: “It’s very hard work, doing The Trip. Much harder than it appears, because the trick – the curse – of doing it well is that it looks like you’re just having fun. But it was meticulously improvised. Rob and I get on very well but we also know where to take the improvisation to make it fruitful.”