All I knew about Verona, pretty much, was "Two Gentlemen of Verona" (which I tried out as a joke line when talking about the fact that Dale and I were going there...and believe me, as a joke it never achieved liftoff) and "Romeo and Juliet". Now I think if I ever go back to Italy, I might have to go back there.
Let's just get it out of the way: This is the so-called "Juliet balcony", attached to a house owned by the Capulet family. I'm glad I don't know enough about anything to try and estimate the date that balcony was built. I also did you a favour and didn't show the crowd down below in the courtyard waiting to pay 10 Euros to get up there and have a picture taken, or the incredibly graffiti-laden passage from the street gate to the inner courtyard. Romeo and Juliet may or may not have been completely fictional, but boy that's a story with some legs.
In retrospect, it's funny I never noticed much of anything when we got there and started wandering around trying to find where we were staying...but once we got set and went out again - !
This city is just stuffed with evidence of how often somebody took it over and fortified it. There are the remains of several iterations of empires that recognized its strategic importance to trade and transport, and in fact it's still a transport hub - that's why WE were there, after all. Just an overnighter to catch a train.
Check out the wall...there appear to have been a few sets of repairs done there over time....
Pretty much the same shot at night, with dramatic lighting.
This was the road through that fort to another bridge over the river...
The oldest part of the city is surrounded by a river that describes a big lazy arch around the whole thing, and which is crossed by several graceful old bridges.
I think this was Gaglardi bridge, had some of the art deco heroic-soldier-of-the-people-communist-fascist type sculptures at either end...
There must be ugly bridges over it somewhere that I just missed.
There are a LOT of churches, the bishop of the region has a seat here, Templars built churches and castles here.
A medieval church featuring reliquaries for people who were either really holy or really rich. No editorial offered on the "or both" option. See the sarcophagus above the entryway?
See the giant doors and the itsy-bitsy human-sized entrances in them? Do they ever open those giant ones up? Maybe for spring cleaning? On the right is a detail from a different church door - hard to see but I think it's St. George slaying a dragon, and I kind of wonder how he ended up here in northern Italy. Templars?
Here, for fun, is a clip taken from one of the bridges over that river at mid day. The visuals were intended as secondary to the sound of a lot of churches in a small area ringing their bells...every hour, every day...so turn up the volume (and I hope this works):
This Roman bridge was blown up by the retreating German army in WWII - in fact all the bridges were.
I know you're thinking "that sure looks like a repair job", and I agree....I'm just saying it was done way before WWII, at least according to "before and after" pictures on display nearby.
Like in Berlin, I am amazed that someone knew how to put things like these back together again, so they look just like the "before" photos. Not only did this bridge serve to get across the river, but it also had a role in diverting the river into the nearby "Arena" so that the Romans could stage mock naval battles in there. Divert a river, for kicks. It's like the whole Roman empire was made up of people whose Inner Teenager completely called all the shots. Think about all the excesses and a lot of the achievements of the Roman Empire, and what do you get? Nothing shouts Inner Teenager like mindless excess and runaway energy, and those guys had both in spades.
The remaining piece of the outer wall of the Arena. There's a gate number above each of the arches at the ground level, something like LXI and LXII...so you can tell your buddies where to meet up before tonight's big mock naval battle.
When we first saw the Arena, and after a few more minutes of "Gee, I don't remember them talking about THIS in high school history...", I made an assumption that the outer ring must have been knocked down by bombing in WWII. Wrong-o. The plaque explained that there was a big earthquake in 1157, and that's what knocked it down, not a lot of silly little bombs. So for about the last 900 years seating capacity in this thing has been down from 30,000 to a mere 15,000. They use it for outdoor opera, and there was one on the evening we were there.
The coveted pano shot...the outer wall fragment is over there on the left, if that helps with a sense of scale...
Looking at the people in these pictures, the evidence is that it was only me walking around with my mouth hanging open. Daytime at the Arena.
All lit up for the opera. You could hear the music out here in the plaza. Not a great shot, but you get the idea.
The residents also used all the rubble from that outer ring to build things and to pave nearby streets in what looks like marble (which reminds me: they must have some Most Excellent Laws in Italy around things like who you May and May Not Sue when whatever they've paved those streets with gets wet, because it's REALLY slippery when it gets wet. Verona may be the home of Romeo and Juliet, but it must also be The City of Broken Hips).
The Romans left other things behind, too.
A Roman gate at what was once the southern boundary of the city, built sometime around Caesar's time, I think. The city has grown to the point where this is now in the northern half of it. The street that I stood on to take this shot goes straight south, and is about the only straight street in Verona. There used to be a building above it and tunnels through the wall, but only the facade remains.
Okay, unless we go through all the centuries of trade and commerce that Verona has hosted, a lot of the pictures I have won't have any kind of context, but....I'm sticking them in here anyway, so when you go there you can figure things out for me:
See the arches beside the river? They're where barges and ships would tie up and unload merchandise into the basement of that building you can see across the street and above, which would have belonged to a fairly wealthy merchant. There were a lot of these along the river at one time.
Again, hard to see, but right in the middle of this shot are some kind of ancient ruin that we didn't get to, with everything around them built up...like they were too much trouble to tear down, and that's the only reason they're still there.
I'd like to have this house...the street that a lot of people live along just comes to an end at the gate to this house' s courtyard. You'd have your own little parade every time you came out of that gate and walked down your street.
This is in a large public square, no idea what that column with what might be a griffin on it is supposed to be about...but check out all the statues along the top of that building. This used to be city hall. No idea who they all are, either, but I'm saying you just don't get buildings made that way any more.
Another highly (but more cheaply) decorated building in that same square. I have no idea how long all that painting on the top floor walls has been there, but it's just there right out in the sun and wind and rain.
One of the streets leading off that square, with an arch celebrating...somebody. I'd like to know who, and when.
Another arch, a bridge between upper floors of two buildings facing into the square...and the single most enigmatic piece of decoration I saw anywhere. No idea at all what that thing hanging under the arch is. An elephant tusk? The last fragment of some elaborate wooden sculpture? A piece of driftwood that saved some rich 17-century guy's life? The Shadow knows....
"Emm in London" has a blog that says "The keystone of the 18th century Palazzo Carli reads satis beatus
which translates as ‘sufficiently happy’.... This building
was once the home to the Hapsburg ruler and is now NATO headquarters." Emm is focused (no pun intended) on photography, her picture is better than mine, and the ellipse in the quote above was to take out photography-related remarks. Headquarters of NATO, though? And as another aside, I'm not too sure how comfortable I am with that carved face representing the sentiment "sufficiently happy". Happy about what, I wonder. Doesn't LOOK too jolly.
This is a pretty bad low-light effort. No idea why so many of the gateways have such ogre-like images on them. I'd have liked to have made this my Facebook profile pic, but it's too poor an image. Saved from myself again.
I wonder if this building was always about money. I like my banks to be supported by classical statuary, as opposed to sound financial practices, don't you?
A detail above a church door. You're saved from me going on about the inscription because I didn't get a good enough shot to be able to read it.
Finally, my friend Dale leading the way out of town (on those treacherous yet beautiful sidewalks...(must everything be a metaphor?)) after our 18 hours or so in Verona.
The Italian part of My Big Fat Vacation was centered on riding bicycles in the Italian countryside, and then eating terrific food at the cycling hotel in the company of the people you spent the day riding with. That said, here's a picture that has nothing to do with that but is from Italy:
Here's a view of the beach in front of our hotel, looking north towards Venice (no, it's not visible...I just wanted to get a reference to a famous Italian city in there). The water was nice, the beach endless...and I was only down here this one time, too busy eating riding and resting.
The Belvedere hotel has marketed itself very thoroughly and successfully in the greater Vancouver area, and as a result the majority of guests in the hotel were Canadians from the lower mainland. It's basically an all-inclusive, with the advantages and drawbacks that implies. I imagine summer camps were like this, for kids who went to the same ones for several years - people get to know each other and the staff from prior years. You were out in the Italian countryside all day, but not really involved with Italy at all. The people at the hotel and the ride guides and the food were all fantastic, and I'd recommend this place to anyone who wants to ride a bike in Italy. They do it all.
This was my bike, a Wilier carbon frame with all-Campagnolo components, a much nicer bike than my own. It was worth whatever I paid to rent it just because I got to tell my brother I rode an all-Campy bike.
Every evening the idea was that you'd pick a ride for the next day that suited your level of fitness, fatigue, and ambition. You'd get up the next morning, eat a huge breakfast, pick up a sandwich and a banana, and take your bike from the locker to the assigned meeting area outside the hotel. You'd go for whatever ride you'd elected, arrive back at the hotel early to mid-afternoon, and commence eating, drinking, and variously goofing off until it was time to pick the next day's ride and go to bed. This seems like a good way to live.
The "eat and drink with the people you rode all day with" part of the program. I made this deliberately ill-focused for the sake of anonymity. All right, that last part's a lie.
This is a sample menu from a random day that explains the poor focus in that last picture, as well as why some of the people in it are looking down, focused on their plates. The food was just great, and it was like this every day, every meal.
As faithful readers can attest, I am a keen observer of my surroundings, so after a couple of days of this I began to become vaguely aware that there are a lot of castles and fortresses and ancient walled towns in Italy. In fact it seemed like we saw a different one each ride. I don't know how they managed it, but somehow the Italians have managed to locate all these places on the tops of hills so that cyclists have to work for the reward of seeing them. I didn't even know cycling was a thing in the Middle Ages.
One of the first Castles of the Day. Note how tiny that car is, yet how it just fits into that gate. Maybe that`s why there are so many tiny cars in Europe, to get through all these tiny gates. Even donkeys and horses must be small there.
Here's what that opening looks like from the inside. I can't believe people drive in here.
...but here is the Main Drag leading in from that little tiny doorway, and there are a bunch of cars...
A couple of noticeable things about Italian roads and drivers:
- drivers were really, really good about dealing with cyclists on all those narrow switchback roads. You would think all Italians rode bikes and know what it`s like.
- when you see a bit of road marked off as under repair, you often notice that the markers, cones, etc, appear to have been there for a few seasons. In Germany, when you saw cones and markers you also saw guys in vests with shovels and equipment actually making repairs.
There`s a town we rode through that had a gigantic poster in the middle of it celebrating home town hero Grand Prix motorcycle champion Valentino Rossi. I hope Valentino is a good guy, because it seems clear there`s any number of people in this area who would die for him in a heartbeat. Little flags in his colours with his number 46 on them are everywhere. He should retire and go into politics immediately, I think.
This is the private estate, complete with private race track, of Gran Prix motorcycle champion Valentino Rossi. The road from where this pic was taken is way up a lot of hills. I think we went by here three different days. That`s the Adriatic there in the background on the right.
This is Valentino`s number on a flagpole by the road...taken from the wrong side. Again, the wrong side and poor focus are my protest over runaway hero worship. Not.
Urbino, home of Raphael, the highlight of the Italian week, well worth the long climb to get to.
We came from the viewpoint on that last picture down this VERY steep and busy street into the heart of Urbino. This is the biggest street in town. It`s in places like this that some of the drawbacks of having your feet clipped onto pedals tend to become apparent.
My friend Michael says Hello from Urbino.
All our bikes lined up for coffee break outside the university in Urbino. That one you like best, the one you think is coolest, the red one third from the right, that one is mine.
It floors me that people, kids really, get to go to university in a place like this.
This was in the middle of another castle town on top of a particularly nasty climb...a little special fountain just for cyclists.
Intrepid hill-climb specialist Michael Jones saddling up after his turn at the fountain.
A typical view of countryside, with the Adriatic way to the east, and the switchbacks we`d just laboured up in the foreground. Nowhere is more beautiful than British Columbia, but this was beautiful.
This is a vineyard, where we went and picked grapes and drank wine and ate lunch, and then rode home. The wisdom of that last part is questionable, but not the pleasure.
A memorial to a big battle in WWII.
Picking grapes, prior to crushing them with our feet. Really.
This is a cafe in San Marino, a tiny independent republic on the top of a mountain. The cafe is carved right out of the rock. I think this is the lone image I captured of the Republic of San Marino.
This is some small village central plaza. That round brick thing is a well, with a locked iron lid on it.
Ever wonder where pomegranates come from? They come from trees growing randomly beside Italian country roads.
I don't think I have a lot more to add here, pithy observations to make. This was a great holiday, suitable for cyclists of all ages and audacity, wonderful scenery and cool places. I barely mentioned San Merino, a tiny little hilltop republic, (here's a Euro coin with their name on it):
said nothing about what it's like to zoom through a roundabout in a group of 20 cyclists, (the rule is if the leader of the group makes it into the roundabout, the rest of the group is treated by other motorists as one vehicle, so if your leader gets it right the rest of you just follow...every roundabout is like a little mini-parade), or how ridiculously expensive sunscreen, of all things, seems to be, or how helpful and accommodating every single person working at the Belvedere is, or what "haig" in your espresso tastes like...but I'd recommend it all to anyone, anytime.
