My Verona

Today we hit the road and visited Verona, a city about a 45 minute drive from Padua. I didn’t know much about Verona except that it is the location for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette. I did a bit of research online before we left and learned that it offers extensive Roman ruins and architecture.

I found Verona to be an absolutely beautiful city, and took an instant liking to it, just as I did to Siena several years ago. There were quite a few people visiting there today, but we didn’t let that stop us from looking at beautiful churches and piazzas, and one of the best-kept amphitheaters in Italy. In fact it is the third largest amphitheater in Italy, following only behind Rome and Capua.

We stopped at a wine bar and had a glass of Valpolicella and a glass of Bardolino, both which were very good. The Veneto region is famous for nice wines that are not terribly expensive, such as the two we tried, as well as Proscecco and Soave. In fact, on the way back to Padua we stopped in the village of Soave, though we didn’t get out of our car. Soave was also a very pretty village on top of a hill.

We were going to take back roads to get home, but ran into a massive traffic hangup. Unfortunately, we also witnessed an accident in which a scooter was “whitelining” (driving between cars on the white line, apparently legal in Italy) and a woman did a u-turn and ran into him. We watched long enough to see that the man got up and was walking around, but it looked like he was not in great shape. Yuck. We then decided to return to Padua via the autostrada, which turned out to be a mistake. There was construction going on, and it took considerably longer to get home than it would have if we had just stayed on the regular highway.

We had dinner tonight at a restaurant that really catered to the local community. Neither the owner nor the waiter spoke a word of English. They didn’t have a menu, and the waiter told us what they offered, and with the help of a lot of hand gestures and my handy dandy dictionary, we were able to get somewhat of an idea of our choices. Let me just tell you that horse was once again prominently featured. Hmmm. I had rigatoni in a spicy tomato sauce, and Bill had spaghetti with duck ragu. The owner brought us out a little appetizer on the house which we thought was very nice. It included some sausage (probably horse but I don’t want to think about it), riso e biso, and tuna salad.

Tomorrow our tentative plan is to head east to Trieste, Italy and Pula, Croatia.