Fair Verona

So, as I mentioned, Leah and I went to Verona last weekend, the city that constitutes the setting of Romeo and Juliet. For those of you who read Leah’s blog, she gave a pretty good synopsis of the journey, so I will not discuss the exact same things. For those of you who don’t, I guess you just won’t get all the same details; but as my entries are generally lengthy at any rate, I hope you won’t mind.

For the first time in a while, my trip across town to get to the train station on time did not involve chasing any buses or begging the drivers to let me on. No trains were missed, and so all was well and lacking in stress. Yay! Leah had done the planning on this one, and so I just left things up to her and followed her intentions for the weekend. The hostel, which we found during the day so as to make life easier later on, was rather nice for having such a good price, with stone courtyards and a garden, large kitchen, balcony or two, and very Italian-looking rooms (i.e.: lots of stone-tiling and creamy stucco with wood beams in the ceilings). We got an 11-bed dormitory to ourselves, it turned out later on, as the other two girls with intentions to stay there actually got locked out for the night and came stumbling in in the morning to reclaim their stuff.

Wanderings in Verona

For several hours, we wandered at will through the streets of Verona, coming across what appeared to be an abandoned zoo in the park along the Wall, the old castle (named the same: Castelvecchio) along the way, and exploring the courtyard. A number of buildings in Verona, including the house section of the castle, have vaguely medieval-middle-eastern architecture, which surprised me: scalloped window frames with little carved geometric rosettes between the arches, and most obviously, the use of red-and-white alternating voussoirs – strips of alternatingly colored stone over arches and on the walls of buildings, famously found in, say, the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Not knowing much about Verona’s history or the culture in which those buildings were designed, I really have no clue why this would be so. But it created a once again very different visual character to the city. I think every place I’ve been so far here has had quite an individual seeming personality (both for the structures and the people), noticeable even from my short touristy visits. I wonder if that has to do with how they once were actual city-states and were very separate entities politically and somewhat culturally, and therefore developed such diverse identities?

We ended up going through a part of the Centro Storico (historic center) of Verona, an overwhelmingly crowded shopping district, and finally found ourselves in Piazza Brà, one of the larger squares in the city center. It’s the site of a Roman theater still in use today for the popular opera performances that Verona hosts every summer. We didn’t go inside because of the cost of tickets, but the outside was cool to look at – a miniature coliseum. It would’ve been a great experience to get to actually see an opera while in Italy, especially in Verona, since it’s such a part of the Italian artistic identity, but unfortunately the season has already ended for the year.

We had been headed towards Piazza Brà mainly because we had intended to catch a tour group meeting there… but the group never showed up... Ok, we figured, why not take the little street-train tour we saw earlier, even if it’s not as long as the one we originally wanted? But noooo, even though the conductor was supposed to be giving tours for another hour, he thought that two girls alone, instead of his normal 7-15 people, wouldn’t be worth the effort… and he kicked us out of the train. It was then too late for another tour to be found. So I can’t tell you very much about the history or the historic sights of Verona, although we at least walked past the main ones.

Juliet and Superstitions

And yes, we did visit the “house of Juliet”, which was indeed part of the “Capulet” (Capelli) family holdings, although no one resembling Juliet in Veronese history actually ever lived there. There is of course a statue of Juliet in the courtyard, with which people have their pictures taken, which in turn has led very specific pieces of the Juliet statue to be very brightly polished, while others are left to turn black over the years. So, if you look at my photo of the statue on my flickr, the fact that her right arm and breast are almost glowingly white is not a result of a flash. People just like to touch them a lot. I don’t know how that tradition started, but there you go.

The neat thing about Juliet’s courtyard is the entryway and its walls – hundreds of people leave wishes of love for Juliet to grant, or messages about couples staying together or love notes, etc. A few years ago, in order to preserve the walls, wanted to prohibit people from writing on them anymore, but couldn’t get the visitors to stop. Solution: cover the walls in a thin, invisible layer of plastic on which people could write, not knowing the difference and which then the museum could regularly replace! So the walls get almost every reachable square inch covered in letters, grafitti and gum, and become a rainbow messy wall of love.

Leah told me about something similar in Florence: a fence or something on which couples hang locks under the premise that their love will last until the lock breaks and falls off. Of course, there are so many locks hung that the authorities have to cut them off once a week. So much for that superstition to get good luck. Back in Verona again, there is an archway with a whale rib hanging from the center, with the prophecy that it will fall on the first person to pass underneath who has never told a lie. Leah and I stood under it for a while, but apparently the whale rib thought we weren’t honest enough to grace with its fall. Oh darn. I wonder how often the city checks to make sure that thing’s still screwed in tightly. Which is more valuable, liability or publicity?

The Labyrinth of the Giardini Giusti

My favorite part of the trip was our visit to the Giardini Giusti, famous for its labyrinths and winding garden paths, super-tall cypruses, and the fact that Goethe came up with an incorrect theory of evolution sometime before Darwin based on the leaves of the Gardens’ trees, with a cyprus in particular attributed to this event. These labyrinths didn’t involve David Bowie or goblins trying to delay us or the Bog of Eternal Stench (thank God), and were more manicured than the gardens in the Secret Garden, but I couldn’t help but think of these two favorite stories of mine as we wandered the twisting paths in the filtered morning light (the former references, for any deprived souls who haven’t seen it, are to the 80s movie “Labyrinth”). Some of the sections were actual mini-labyrinths, although only around thigh-high, probably to prevent anyone from getting seriously lost in there. There were also stone and pebbled paths winding this way and that among the trees, with statues silently emerging from the bushes, and not-quite-ruinous rooms of columns or pavilions, and stone benches speckling the corners of the paths. There was what seemed to be an old broken shrine in a strange cave, whose surface was lined with not only stones and stucco but also shards of glass and seashells, and of which I simply could not get a good photograph. There is a snarling face on the front of a balcony aligned with the center pathway through the Gardens, tucked into a wall of vines and sundry plantlife to look down upon those wandering the labyrinths, and a tower that brings you up to the highest plateau of the terraced hillside, leading to a great view over the roofs of Verona.

In short, a great place to spend a morning. It felt surreal at times, as though Leah and I should be ladies of some far gone time, ambling through the gardens in hoopskirts and trailing gowns, arm in arm and speaking of suitors. Or as though little fairies should be flitting from tree to tree, in the half-magical light between the cypruses and the mysterious turnings of the pathways. But eventually we found ourselves back at the beginning, and decided to make our way out into the more expectable world and towards the train station – which was harder than anticipated, as we’d gone off the map. But it all worked out in the end, as it always does. And there were no sketchy men met upon the way home this time!

I’m not planning on going anywhere this weekend, for the first time since my first weekend in Ferrara, so hopefully I will finally get to catch up somewhat on organizational errands, responding to people’s messages, and get to webcam chat with those of you who are available and to whom I haven’t spoken in too long. Tonight though, I hope to be able to do more cooking and hanging out with Leah, which should be a decent way to end the week. It’s very lonely at times not having yet been able to make friends with any Italians, but I am so glad that at least there is someone I’m pretty comfortable with here like Leah. Also, MK and I at least will be visiting Will Tucker in Germany in less than two weeks, so I am very excited to see the two of them. Chatting/email, webcams and ryanair = saving grace while abroad. Joy for the internet. (And joy for the fishies in the deep blue sea, joy for you and me.) Ok, I'm going to stop rambling now. Be well, all.

- Emmons, signing out.