Tuesday was an EARLY day, our train left the station at 7:30 on route to Verona. Our plan for the day was to spend it in and around the city while also taking a quick trip out to Lake Garda. We arrived and decided we should head straight to the lake by bus and enjoy it for a few hours before coming back and spending the remainder of our time in Verona. The bus to the lake was about 45 minutes and gave us the chance to see things we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Once at the lake we spent time walking along the shore and up towards the next town. It was much, much busier than Como, full of European tourists: camping, sun-tanning, and boating. I feel like Como is the nicer of the two but there was much more to do in Garda. We sat for awhile just talking and taking photos before heading back to town to catch our bus.
Sadly the one universal thing in Italy in August is holidays, meaning the majority of people don’t work during this month. As a result, without announcing to anyone, a number of buses had been cancelled and ours ended up being about 45 minutes late. We managed to finally make it back to Verona and spent our afternoon seeing the sights.
We visited Castelvecchio, the most important military construction of the Scaliger dynasty that ruled the city in the Middle Ages, before heading over to see Juliette’s house and taking a photo with her statue and finally ending in the centre around the Arena. The Roman amphitheatre is famous for the large-scale opera performances given there. It is also one of the best preserved ancient structures of its kind.
We spent some more time walking around the outskirts of the town down by the river stumbling across some old roman ruins. Once I saw them I remembered having seen them when I visited Verona back in 2006. The first time I was here, I was with my uncle Bill, cousin Emily, and my mother.
We had booked our return train tickets in advance to save a bucket load of money but we may have stayed longer than Verona has things to do so we detoured to a bar that had 3.50 euro Spritz and a buffet of aperitifs. We ate our fair share before heading to the train station and heading back to Milan.
Graham McCormick 