Verona

Lots of Italian cities are a mix of the ancient and the modern. But visiting Verona, more than any of the other cities, is like taking a stroll though multiple centuries in succession. We visited Ancient Roman ruins, a thirteenth century castle, and a sixteenth/seventeenth century garden. And along the streets, interspersed with shops and boutiques, the likes of which you might see in New York or Chicago, were the centuries-old homes of Romeo and Juliet.

One of the first sites we stopped at was the Teatro Romano, where an early Christian monastery had been built on an around some ancient Roman ruins. The monastery now houses a museum full of Roman and Etruscan artifacts found in Verona and the surrounding areas from the first century BC through the seventh AD.

Next stop was my number one must-see for Verona: the Giusti Gardens. It was marvelous. This garden was designed to gently lead visitors on a seemingly random path that gradually leads higher and higher, to increasingly impressive views of the city, lending a sense of authority and influence to the family who lived in the villa you see in the background.
The path is sort of hidden so you can't see where it's going, and there are little alcoves and grottoes built into the landscape here and there. It's pretty cool. The stone dragon face you see looming over the stairway in the picture below used to spout fire from its mouth. These guys were all about wowing their guests.
There was also a labyrinth made of shrubbery in one part of the garden. Heidi and I decided to race to the center of the maze. Heidi won...
I came in second. One of the most delightful things about Verona is how everyone gets swept away with the idea of a Romeo and a Juliet having possibly lived there hundreds of years ago. As Heidi and I walked through the archway that leads from the modern shop-lined street into the courtyard of La Casa di Giulietta, we saw hundreds and hundreds of love messages (which apparently include "Bern + Aleta" a couple of times) graffiti-ed on the stone. Here's a view of the house with the famous balcony:

You can't tell from the picture, but there are mobs of people in the courtyard here, many of them waiting for their chance to have their picture taken next to a statue of Juliet. We managed to get a few snapped sans the many adolescent boys and girls surrounding it. As you can see from the highly polished areas, poor Juliet has been fondled to pieces. I think my favorite moment of the day was when a boy who looked about thirteen and sweet as can be took his turn next to the statue and hesitantly put his hand on Juliet's shoulder for about half a second before he decided he was too shy to do that and just clasped his hands in front of him for the picture.

Verona also boasts the final resting spot of Juliet. Here is the tomba di Giulietta:

So sad. Romeo's resting place is apparently somewhere else. Poor Juliet! (and poor Juliet's statue!) For the record, apparently Shakespeare based his play on a novel of sorts by a guy who reportedly used the Verona city chronicles as his source material.

Finally, we walked over to the colosseum on our way to the train station. Unfortunately, we couldn't go inside because there was a KISS concert happening there that night. That explained all the black t-shirts and funny face paint we had been seeing all day.

Two other adventures from the day deserve mention. The first was Heidi and I realizing that we had eaten our lunch of smooshed sandwiches not in a nice friendly park, but in the favorite spot of the Verona homeless. We realized this as a man who looked extremely drunk or otherwise impaired started following us and calling out unintelligible things (unintelligible both from the foreign language and from the slurred speech).

The second involves traveling home (getting from place to place in Italy seems always to be an adventure). We had been feeling pretty good about ourselves after successfully riding the bus and the train and navigating our way around town all day, but we had a little mishap in the train station on the way home. It involved mistakenly getting on a train that was shutting down for the night, nearly getting locked on it, getting off with the help of the conductor, running back down to look at the screen to see if we could still catch our train, and running like mad to the right platform just in time to see our train pulling away. Instead of waiting an hour and a half for the next regional train, we hopped on a different train half an hour later that went where we needed to go, although it probably needed a different ticket because the fare was higher. Luckily we didn’t get kicked off. Whew!