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Published: February 11th 2010
We were finally in Italy, and even though it was a cold snowy bastard of a day, I couldn't believe that I was actually going to see fair Verona. You know, where Shakespeare laid his scene! Two star cross'd lovers and all that jazz!
The day didn't start off well, as we needed to use the internet for a couple of banking and blogging reasons. We stopped at McDonald's, fine. We finally found a powerpoint, realised our two new adaptors didn't fit in Italian sockets for some reason, grabbed the old one, fine. Went to log onto the internet, but you need an Italian SIM card and your passport details don't you? What the f**k? NOT fine! What do they think I'm going to do, hack into bloody government computers whilst hoeing into a Big Mac? Idiots. Needless to say I was quietly pissed off, and there was nowhere around that we could get a SIM card at the time. We consoled ourselves with a cornetti (croissant) and a lovely coffee, and then found a shopping centre where we bought a TIM Italian SIM card and got it registered, before realising the local Maccas didn't have WiFi and gave up.
Finally There!
The Border Between Monaco And ItaliaWe then decided to leg it to Verona, hopefully to get there before dark.
I want you guys to remember that I'm treating the distances we're doing very flippantly here. When I say we just jumped up and drove from Genoa to Verona, it's actually about 330 km. In the last blog alone, 4200 words spanned a total distance of nearly 2300km in five days, including dicking around and GPS misdirection, although I made it sound not far at all. Not writing ourselves up or anything, but even by Australian standards it's really covering some ground in a relatively short period of time.
I'd also like to point out that Verona wasn't the first place we were intending to go in Italy. My Mum had called a couple of days earlier and told us that my cousin Chris (well my second cousin, Mum's first) was staying in a house in Lake Como, north of Milan. If you've never heard of Lake Como before, then that's not unusual. It is however, quite famous amongst people who have been to Italy. George Clooney has a house on the shores of the Lake, for example. How the hell was Chris staying
there? I have no idea, maybe he's stinking rich and I didn't know it. Mum said that Chris would be happy to have us, but after much deliberation we decided that as it was already 3 degrees above zero a long way south of Milan, we really didn't want to brave more snowy conditions up north again. Driving in snow without snow tyres/chains ain't fun unless you're mental, and to be frank we didn't have the time or money to do it. It was disappointing, and we would have loved to have gone, but maybe next time.
On the whole, the drive to Verona was fairly uninspiring. Central Northern Italy has never had a very good reputation for being picturesque, and is nothing short of an industrial flatland from what we could see. Lots of factories, steaming smokestacks, and not much else. The towns themselves were a pretty sorry sight, lots of grey and commission housing. Come to think of it, it was sort of like being back in Poland actually. But luckily the further East we went, the more the cute farmland began to shine through, but the grey skies got greyer and greyer. When small flecks of
snow started bouncing off the windshield, we smiled at each other and chucked on another layer. We finally descended on Verona itself, and parked just inside the city walls in the fading evening light. As Aleks has written here in my day-notes book, it reminded her of the song "Hazy Shade Of Winter" by Simon and Garfunkel, and she's not too far off the mark at all.
There was enough light in Verona at 4pm to see what we needed to see, luckily. We toyed with the idea of stopping outside the city for the night and going back in the morning, but realised that the place wasn't exactly Paris and we could probably see what we needed to see in a couple of hours. There was a Roman Arena/Amphitheatre near the walls of the town, built in the 1st century AD, and was a strange pinky and whitey kind of colour scheme. We obviously didn't go inside, but got some photos of the outside nonetheless. Next to that was an ice skating rink, and we almost went for a skate but changed our minds at the last minute. We still haven't been for an ice skate on any
of the rinks we've seen so far, and I'm a bit unhappy about that, but at the same time I can go to Canterbury or Ryde anytime for an hour for a quarter of the price. Not quite the same atmosphere, but I think I'll live.
Verona also had an incredible town square called the Piazza dei Signori, filled with market stalls selling amazing masquerade masks and Murano glass and other bits of paraphernalia. This was our first real exposure to the huge market of masks and glass in the north of Italy. I won't divulge too much on it now, I'll wait to describe all the real stuff when it comes up in Venice. The market square was next to the Loggia del Consiglio with it's 98m high belltower. It's a beautiful piece of renaissance architecture.
We also followed the Lonely Planet trail to the Casa de Guilieta, aka the House Of Juliet, where a touristy statue of the maiden herself and her balcony have been set up. As we arrived we had to really weave our way in through a crowd of six million Japanese tourists. The place is a total gimmick, but the biggest gimmick is
the bronze statue of Juliet; apparently if you rub her right breast you will have another lover soon in your life. Needless to say the breast was shined to an incredible sheen, and all the Japanese girls were giggling like idiots and giving the peace sign like crazy. Another amazing thing about that little square was the wall of messages, a huge wall with sticky post-it notes of all different colours all over it, sending messages to Juliet or a lover-in-waiting. See photos.
That was about all we really needed to see of Verona. The place has an atmosphere that you can't really capture in photos, especially when it's late at night and the blue-grey haze of snow hangs all around you like some old faded pashmina. We tried to get a photo up the river but not sure if you can see it for yourselves from that. We camped the night at a truck stop on the other side of Padua and had an early one, as it was Venice day the next day. Joy!
And so we woke up and bolted to a place called Mestre just near Venice, a nightmare to find and navigate around,
but a little birdie had told us was Mestre was a nice free parking spot, right next to the train station. Once again risking a break in, but keeping our fingers crossed, we ditched the camper and walked five minutes around the corner to the train station. Another reason for leaving the camper is simply this: there's no bloody room for cars over there. If you look at a map of the place you'll understand why. It's all just canals, alleyways, waterfronts, and not much else. At the station we bought our tickets, and in ten minutes we were across the harbour and stepping out of the Venice train station into the morning sun.
Venice at first sight is exactly like it looks in every postcard, photo and movie you've ever seen. EXACTLY the same. To see it on a beautiful day like we had there was a once in a lifetime chance for us, and for a few minutes we simply stood on the station's steps, dumbstruck. The canals were right there in front of us and the first bridge that crossed them was a marvellous thing, a huge ornate arch with a couple of little canal barges
trundling under it. There were tourists everywhere of course, but for some reason they simply blended in to the surroundings. We then took to the alleys.... and got lost.
Really lost. Like the whole day kind of lost.
We had been warned by several sources that Venice is the kind of place you shouldn't try to find your way in. Just deal with getting lost just like everyone else does. We bought ourselves a map from the tourist information office but that was no good. In the end we just shoved the map in our pockets and wandered. The place was picture perfect at every turn, be it the beautiful colours of the buildings and their simple yet elegant architecture, or the rows of gondola boats ramped up next to each other all in shiny black with gold etching and paint and polished metal. If it wasn't that, it was the squares filled with people smoking, drinking coffee and sucking up the sunshine, University students hustling along, and the little boats always buzzing around the canals, whether they were shipping barges or gondolas or simply people moving from place to place with their dog on the front. It
was incredible. Everyone who ever goes there will tell you it's completely enchanting, and they're right on the money.
While we got lost we found ourselves a bit peckish and so grabbed a calzone and a slice of pizza to snack on. We're quite happy with the fact that we may stack on a little bit of weight while we're here, but the trade off is that we get to smash all this good food. As we walked and ate, we found ourselves still hungry. Walking out onto the waterfront viewing at the Giudecca canal, we grabbed some gelato and admired the distant islands of Santa Maria something something and Giudecca something.
Yes, I'm sick of trying to remember forty foot names. And as if you care what they're called anyway!
There is a list a mile long of buildings and things to see in Venice, and we're pretty sure we saw about three quarters of them, but to list them here would be meaningless to you. Suffice to say there were a lot of old cathedrals, basilicas, etc etc. The things that really struck us though were the stores. Murano glass in the place where it's
made... I've never seen more beautiful glass in my life. Ever. It's just the most stunning stuff and I wish we could get it easily at home. It's so cheap over here (well, in comparison to how much it'd cost in Oz). Masquerade masks hand made by the best mask makers in Italy, the guys that supply for Hollywood and have been making them for years. I wish that I could also buy one or two of those to put on the wall at home... But how would you get them there? We've never been so tempted to buy a whole lot of stuff and box it up and ship it off. Maybe next time when we have empty suitcases.
As the day drew to a close and the sun began to disappear behind the buildings, we jumped into a tiny local cafe for a glass of Venetian Prosecco and a chin wag about how amazing the day had been. We then aimed for the train station, but promptly got lost again, and as we were looking at the map trying to work it out, a lovely lady approached us and asked in perfect English where we were headed.
We told her the train station, and she said she was going that way too and told us to follow. This lady was a real character, a born and bred 60-odd year local of Venice. We talked about the threat of pollution to the locals from the local refineries across the bay on the mainland, the stupid government and their pigeon-elimination priorities, tourists and their impact and tons of other stuff. And I tell you what, she set a cracking pace through those little streets !I felt like I was Charlie, being raced through the Chocolate Factory with Willie Wonka. Eventually we arrived and said our goodbyes, and we thanked her very much for the insight from the other side of the coin.
That was the end of our day in Venice, and we battled with a strike at the train station before giving up and catching a bus back to the car in Mestre and got a fair whack of the driving done to our next destination: Bologna.
In the morning we drove the rest of the way to the home of spaghetti bolognese, lasagna AND tortellini. An interesting point to note here was that there was
snow everywhere by this stage, and the streets in Bologna were lined with it as well as the gardens and lawns being smothered under a good six inch layer. So it was cold, but it was damn pretty too.
Our first priority of the day, however, was to go to McD's for our much needed dose of internet, as we once again had to go and update our Facebook pages and brag about our adventures, and also get two of our blogs uploaded. After we were done we were starving (as we always seem to be), and thus it was time for us to sample some of the local fare for lunch, and so we found a small, simple Trattoria (family run restaurant) where Aleks devoured a delicious lasagne while I had a serving of sage and butter tortellini. They were both excellent, and washed down with a half litre caraffe of the local frizzante bianco. The serving sizes were a little small, but I wasn't worried as this time it was the taste that counted, and I wasn't disappointed. Who ever thought something so simple could taste so incredible? I'm making sage and butter pasta when I get
home for sure.
We then wandered around town for the rest of the afternoon, starting with a couple of Piazza's: Maggiore and Nettuno. Nettuno as you probably guessed, stands for Neptune, and had a huge bronze statue of the man himself, complete with ladies around him spraying water from their... mammaries. Sensational stuff. We also saw the fifth largest basilica in the world, the Basilica San Petronio. The front facade was nothing but a brick wall, but holy jeebers what a monstrously large brick wall it was! The place was truly monumental, simply because inside it was like a huge barn: there were minimal columns and things to keep the roof up, and the feeling was just of vast open space.
As we were walking out we also noticed a lot of chairs piled up outside one of the chapels, and heard the most beautiful, aching three part minor key melody I've ever heard. We thought it was a CD, but it was actually three choirists and a three-man string section comprised of a Cello, a Violin and a Bass. They just looked like they were practising, but they had half the people in the place staring with
Great Photo!
Verona, Italy jaws on the floor. It really was beautiful, they were completely pitch perfect and that's a rare thing to hear these days. I think we got some video, even though we weren't allowed to. Ask me nicely, and I'll show you when I get home. If I ever get home.
We also saw a couple of incredibly tall brown-brick towers called, funnily enough, the Due Torri. Both of them, but one moreso than the other, have a nice lean on them, and they've been affectionately dubbed by the locals as the leaning towers of Bologna. I'm glad they find it so funny. I took one look at both of them and was instantly terrified. If I had to walk around a square in my town under two 90m+ towers leaning precariously, I'd be moving towns in a very short time. We grabbed some books from the local Fratrinelli International bookstore and then got lost on our way back to the car somehow. We did find it though, obviously. That night at the truck stop I got some blogging done (see how much time I spend on this?) while Aleks treated herself to a nice traumatic shower. She went in
thinking she'd asked for a shower, was sent to the bathroom, where there WAS a shower, but for some reason people kept banging on the door the whole time. The whole hair washing and drying exercise was partly waylaid, and she was in a right grump when she got back. I kept blogging and kept quiet.
-sniff sniff-.... Hey! I can smell mortadella, mushrooms and tomatoes going into eggs for dinner! OM NOM NOM! You guys are going to have to wait till the next blog to find out about Lucca, Pisa, Florence and Tuscan camping. NEMO HUNGRY! Oh, and theres a lovely bottle of Venetian Merlot that simply MUST be opened.
So I'll leave it there. I need to cut this one off here so the looming Roma blog doesn't blow out of proportion. It's hard to fit all of Tuscany into a few pages. Let's see how I go. Adios!
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