Verona–Italy

When we arrived in Verona our planned motorhome parking area was a now construction site!! So we drove around some very busy city streets (twice around the outside of Verona) and managed to find a place for EUR 10, next to the fastest flowing ‘canal’ we have ever seen.

No internet here at all, as Steven had some work to do we went for a walk to McDonalds. No luck there either!! An internet free evening.

We awoke to a much cooler and wetter day our first for a couple of weeks or more.

At 9:45 it was out with the umbrellas and we headed for the Piazza Bra and the 1st Century Coliseum. Steven’s phone now scanning for an internet connection and finding one. So we stopped for a while sheltering in an office doorway while downloading emails.

Verona originated in the prehistoric age, probably on the present site of the Ponte Pietra, where the river Adige could be forded along the salt and amber route from the Adriatic to Germany. It was of great importance in the Roman Age and became a Roman town in 49 B.C. Click here for history link.

Nowdays, old Roman Coliseums it seems are a great place to place huge billboards advertising new cars and can also double as a place to store construction materials and other city works bric-a-brac. The coliseum is now once again a theatre, overly touristy and commercialised site admission EUR 6. I guess nothing has changed in 2000 years. We did walk around the outside albeit on our way to explore somewhere else.

We found a nice coffee bar next to some excavated Roman ruins under the middle of the street. Much more interesting and great coffee too. The rain was easing up and blue skies were on the horizon again.

Walking by the Via Mazzini (Verona’s premier shopping strip) to Via Cappello. On Via Cappello you pass Porta Leoni one of the city’s Old Roman Gates. There are two gates here one behind the other the old gate 50-40 BC and the new gate 50 – 70 AD in front of it. Fascinating how these old ruins are now an integral part of the existing buildings. Why waste a good Roman wall!!

Continuing on to the CASA di Gliulietta or Juliet’s house. As featured in Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet. The very long original story was printed way back in 1531 and contained all the facts that Shakespeare would narrate later in his play in 1596. The balcony is part of a 14th century building known as Juliet’s House, which was once the home of the Cappello family – possibly the model for the Capulets of Shakespeare’s play.

Although the Capulet and the Montague families did exist, there is no record of them engaging in a feud, and Romeo and Juliet are entirely fictional characters.
But why let the lack of historical fact get in the way of a good story!

It is a little more crowded now and there seems to be more Juliet’s than Romeo’s in the courtyard. Juliet’s statue is a modern addition 1960s? It is the custom for visitors hoping to be lucky in love to stroke her right breast, which is now highly polished. Steven was smart enough not to try!

The city has many excavated Roman ruins most below street level and many now covered with viewing glass.

We stumbled across the Piazza delle Erbe, a street lined with ‘palaces’ and market stalls for the mobs of tourists walking past following guides with raised flags or umbrellas so they don’t get lost.

Now lost in Verona we walked past the finest Renaissance structures, lots and lots more old stuff before finding the river and following it back most of the way to the hymermobile.