Verona

Guess what? I survived our first travel break! Not without a scratch, but I’m in one piece. Three of my friends and I headed off to Verona and Venezia over a three day weekend and had all sorts of adventures. After conquering the automatic ticket machines, backpacking all the way across Verona, and climbing a giant hill to check into our hostel, we saw Juliet’s house (or the house of some family that had a name that sort of sounds like Capulet…close enough for me) and saw the famous balcony of “The Balcony Scene.”



There’s a lovely statue of Juliet in the courtyard, and tons and tons of lover’s graffiti everywhere.
In fact, there’s lover’s graffiti all over the town. Most of it is variations of “Te amo so and so” but some is a bit more original, if grammatically—shall we say—inventive: “I’m gonna love you till the star fall from the sky for you and I” and “Mi piace tu, mi piace tu, mi piace solo tu” give an idea of the multi-lingual hodge-podge that is scrawled all over town. It didn’t bother me like most graffiti does; Verona is a lover’s town and is romantic enough that one can smile, shrug, and sigh…and harbor a secret wish that some young Romeo would scale a wall with a can of spray paint and pledge eternal devotion to me.
That afternoon we discovered a garden. The first section was all symmetry, boxwood, and Grecian sculpture. Behind that, there was a pretty little English cottage garden with a wild profusion of different colored flowers. Beyond that, there was a hidden path winding between trees and ivy that led to a rose colored portico and a long arbor. Going on, we found a tower with a spiral staircase that took us up to another garden on the top of a wall. The succession of unexpected new landscapes was lovely, but nothing prepared us for what we found. The rooftops of Verona were spread before our feet, with the sky just beginning to get peachy in the prelude to a sunset.



Some genius of a gardener planted tall evergreens and some creeping Alpine-blue flowers, giving the impression that I really was on top of the world. “Further up and further in!” was all I could think of…read C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I learned two good traveling tips: look up often and follow signs, even if you don’t know where they lead. Unexpected treasures seem to enjoy hiding in plain sight and other obvious places.
The morning after our day trip to Venezia (see next blog), we stopped by a park, since the name (literally “Park of the Wall”) had me curious. An excavation of a massive ruin of a Roman muro was circled by a nice little park with benches and iron railings and picnickers. We threw ourselves headlong down a precipitous drop and scrambled over, under, and around the white arches surrounded by ivy, mountain mint, and brambles (which account for the scratches on my ankles). It’s interesting how much more fun you have when getting to something seems like a major accomplishment. However, always, always, always pack good shoes. You want to be ready for that almost-inaccessible Roman ruin when it comes.



Then we dashed to the train station and had an instructive and interesting experience trying to figure out how to get home. Train schedules really do seem arbitrary at times. But we made it back in time for the 17:30 bus! You can’t imagine how much I enjoyed dropping that backpack as soon as I got to my room.