Verona is a wonderful city. If any of you have a chance to visit it, I urge you to jump at the chance. As I have mentioned before, Verona is steeped in history and a wonderful place to be. When Molly, Allie and Amanda came to visit, Verona made it on the agenda largely because of my experience there a few weeks prior. This time, with a bit more knowledge on where to go, we planned to go to some of the awesome places I got to see last time as well as a few new things that I missed last time.
We set off fairly early in the morning, getting breakfast at like 8am. I anticipated us getting a much later start because I figured someone would end up sleeping in so I was stoked when we got off to a good start. Breakfast was awesome because I hadn’t had a breakfast in ages so to get a meal to start the day was wonderful. We started walking from the hotel toward the historic center of Verona. A light fog hung over the valley and made for a nice crisp morning. We quickly came to the Scaligeri castle and took a few pictures.
The castle was built by the powerful Scaligeri family (the same people who made everybody chop off their towers, then paved the streets with the rubble from other people’s towers, most notably the pink and white marble streets that were their favorite walk ways) and has a cool bridge that crosses the river.
We continued our way down the street and, within moments, came to the old roman gate to the city, which is still incredibly in good shape.
We meandered down the street to find this boy playing in the window of a restaurant or hotel as we walked by
We arrived at the Piazza delle Erbe. When we arrived, we found that instead of the usual open market going on, there was more of a renaissance faire-type thing going on which made for some more fun shopping and things going on. It was neat getting to see the people dressed up in their full regalia. I half expected Sheldon to be walking through wearing linen underwear complaining about historical inaccuraceries or pretending to be Spock, researching the rifts in the space time continuum and how those have effected the renaissance.
After wandering our way through the faire, we made our way to Juliet’s Balcony. The balcony was even cooler since this time, I was there with Molly. That certainly made for a far more enjoyable experience than the first time. The girls were somewhat surprised by the crowds and the Italian idea of a line (which is more of a blob). Finally, the girls figured out that to get their picture with Juliet, they would need to just go up there and be somewhat aggressive about it. We decided to pass on the museum and instead headed to the Torre Di Lamberti, the tallest tower in Verona. The next blog post will go into more detail about the tower but it was a great time.
After doing the tower, we went down the cool white and pink street where I showed molly where the Disney Store was located. I swear, its like these are following us! With our trip to Disneyland Paris coming closer with each passing day, it was exciting to see a Disney store. Not that we needed it but it helped us get more excited for our upcoming trip!
However, with so many exciting things in front of us, we pressed on down the street toward the Coliseum. I had told the girls to avoid eye contact with the people who are trying to sell you things and that there would be plenty of people trying to get you to take a picture with them and then ask you for 5 to 10 euro for their time. If you avoid eye contact and keep moving, they will generally just let you pass by and try to get the next people. That plan fell through, however, when a gladiator grabbed Allie. Allie posed with the gladiator and Amanda snapped a few shots of her but then we flew into the coliseum and didn’t give him any money.
The Coliseum was awesome but, with their upcoming summer series of concerts and plays that will take place there, some construction was taking place, like the construction of a stage in part of the pit and the construction of some better seats. Even with all this construction, we still got to run around the coliseum and had a great time doing so, getting plenty of pictures along the way.
After getting out utils in the coliseum, we made our way back to the train station. We took the 1 hour train ride to Venice and were quickly on the hunt for lunch. Having had a great dinner when I went to Venice the last time, I tried to lead us to the same place, only to find that we were about 15 minutes too late for lunch. We continued down the same street and ended up at Il Sandolo, which is not too far from the train station. We Allie and Amanda continued their pasta binge and molly and I shared a chips pizza and Gelato.
With our meal complete, we wandered our way to the famous Rialto Bridge before heading back to the train station to catch our trains back to Torino.
We caught the train to Verona then from Verona caught a train to Torino and made it to Torino with enough time to still introduce Allie and Amanda to Kebab pizza
With a full day like that, we all slept wonderfully but it was cool to think that in 24 hours we went from the home of Romeo and Juliet, climbed towers and coliseums, went to one of the most famous cities in the world and then went across a country and ended up in a place that hosted the winter Olympics. What a day!
No comments:
Post a Comment