Literary Verona

Our final stop on the Italian leg of our journey northward took us to the city of Verona, made famous by a little story you may have heard of called 'Romeo and Juliet.' One hour, 45 minutes away from Bologna, we were greeted with another medieval city even less busy than the one we'd just left. First glimpses did not disappoint.

We considered this a wonderful thing and checked into the very charming B&B King on the outskirts of town. The couple who owned the B&B provided us local recommendations, maps, bikes and fresh homemade focaccia for breakfast. The benefits of being slightly out of centre was that Verona felt very lived in for us. And the city is still very walkable with lots of vantage points and places to perch; we lived a good, slow pace for a few more days.

Our first stop was at the Osteria da Morendin, a local restaurant that looked one part pub and one part your grandmother's kitchen; moving towards the back of the establishment revealed checkered tablecloths and plates as wall decoration. Specials change daily and seasonally and are all written on a chalkboard. Gemma got accidentally brave and ordered the bigoli con asino, a straw-like spaghetti noodle with minced donkey meat. I ordered a tortellini stuffed with blackberries in a red wine reduction. The food was different, good, but not in a way we'd necessarily order either dish again. 

All carbed up, we made our way into Verona proper where the obvious draw lies in all things Shakespeare. From statues to signs to museums, the city does well to trade on its name. 

The bulk of tourists to Verona spend their time in the historic centre and although the story of Romeo and Juliet is entirely fictional but that didn't stop the local council from building a balcony and declaring a house on Via Cappello as 'Juliet's House.' 

Despite how it may seem, the courtyard was teeming with tourists and their cameras. And the passageway to said courtyard is covered in artifices of love: graffiti, bike locks, sticky notes and, perhaps more worryingly, chewing gum. 

The tradition of sending letters to Juliet was immortalised in a 2010 film starring Amanda Seyfried and is steeped in reality. It dates back hundreds of years when people started leaving love notes on what was said to be Juliet's tomb. Then people started sending letters to the city itself. Finally, in the 1990s, the city set up an office to deal with, and reply to, the letters. Around 6000 letters are sent a year and a team of 15 women reply to them in a smattering of languages. NPR wrote a fascinating article you can read here. 

Just down the road, lies fictional Romeo's house. It's less popular, less graffiti-ridden but still there as a stop on the R&J trail.

And thus ended our Shakespeare sightseeing tour roughly 20 minutes after it started. More interestingly, we passed through the city, stopping by the Arena, the world's third largest surviving amphitheatre. In the summer, it's host to evening opera. We milled about one evening, grabbing snippets of the beautiful songs that wafted through the open air.

In Piazza dei Signori there's plenty of places to stop and enjoy a drink, the architecture, the outdoor market selling a range of food, clothing and bizarre wooden toys. 

The Lamberti Tower is the tallest tower in Verona and costs 8 Euro to visit. For an extra euro, you can circumvent the stairs and take the lift to the top. We did neither but apparently the views are good. We'd get better views the next day so we didn't miss out on much.

It probably goes without saying that we had a cursory wander around the piazza before finding places of respite. This took the form of: pizza, granitas, aperol spritzes under an umbrella during the brief rainstorm.

To me, there's no better way to spend a perfect July day.