Verona, July 4th

4th July 1999, 1240hrs Sunday. Verona, Palazzo della Regione. V.v.v.v.v.hot.

Last night’s train journey was no problem. There were plenty of couchettes free, so we took advantage of the fact. We slept from about 2330 ‘til 0445 in our compartment with a Brazilian law student/traveller, and a Taiwanese technician/traveller.
Verona at five o’clock in the morning was a panorama of beautiful Italian buildings and empty cobbled streets, and despite it being 26C even then, a freshness in the air. We walked down deserted streets, through the old city gates, which had a small bronze plaque, with a quotation from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ ...

There is no world without Verona’s walls,
but purgatory, torture and hell itself
Hence banished is banish’d from the world,
and the world’s exile is death

The youth hostel is very nice, with a view of the old town. I’ve started buying postcards already – the city is so beautiful.
The river runs fast and clear, the sky is blue, cypress trees adorn the hills in the town and the architecture is Romanesque and seems fit to house the soul and mind as well as the body. If I had to choose from where we’ve been so far one place I would like to live, for purely aesthetic reasons, Verona wins hands down...
The Roman staircase on the square where I am writing is made of the region’s pink marble, and is very ornate. There’s a large bell tower behind it, dominating the area, including the Piazza de Erbe, outside of these walls. A picture paints a thousand words...okay, so that’s three thousand words – the tower is way too big for only one photo!
I was anxious about not speaking Italian – this is the first country we’ve been to that I haven’t spoken one of the national languages. We’ve been okay so far, but we have only been in Italy for about 14 hours, and only off the train for 7 of those.
We’ve visited ‘Casa di Guillietta’ – Juliet’s house. The entrance, front of the house and all the walls inside the courtyard are covered in lover’s graffiti. There was a balcony, climbing ivy, a bronze statue of Juliet, and a gift shop along one side of the courtyard. It was packed with tourists ( us included, even though we travellers look down on the luxury-seeking, single culture instigating, package tour-taking, “Oh yeah, this reminds me of Vegas,”, gullible, litter-dropping, monolinguistic, “How quaint!”, ‘Speak-loudly-and-clearly-and-everyone-will-understand’, two weeks in Torremelinos type wallahs...) but still quite romantic.