Wherefore art thou?

Today we left Venice and headed west. Final thoughts on Venice - I really liked the history and the canals are great but it would be a pain to live there, imagine renovating a house where everything had to come by boat!

We hit the autostrate and headed to our next destination - the city of Verona.

Of course this city is famous for being the location of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. While a good story it is just that, a story, Shakespeare didn’t visit Verona. Our guide filled us in, apparently Shakespeare based the story on another story written by someone else and it is a bit of a political statement on the tension between the Vatican and the Emperor. Anyway Verona has cashed in on it and you can visit Juliet’s balcony - the original owners in the 14th century had a name similar to Capulet - along with a few hundred of your closest friends, yes it was packed!

Verona’s other claim is a first century arena that is older than the Colosseum. They still use it for concerts and shows.

Verona is on the river Adige which is the second longest in Italy after the Po. It is dominated by the Castel San Pietro which sits on the river.

After looking around we made it back to the bus and onto the autostrade for our next destination - Como, on the lake of the same name.

Some comments about Italian traffic. It is bad! The cities are worse than Sydney as they are usually tiny streets not meant for cars but outside the cities the autostrades are also bad. Most of the time traffic flows OK but there are so many semi trailers it is always heavy. They have to pay tolls but it isn’t fully automatic tolling you have gates to pay by cash, card, or auto-toll so it is usually a mess. Of course road signs and rules are seen as guidelines which can be broken if desired.

We stopped on our way to Como to visit a winery making Franciacorta wine. Despite the name this doesn’t have anything to do with France it is the type of wine they produce. These sparkling red and white wines can only be made in this area of Lombardy and the process has similar controls as the cheese and prosciutto manufacturers we visited the other day.

To date the land we have been travelling through has been flat agricultural land. Como is not far from Milan and is starting to get up into the hills and mountains at the top of Italy. We saw some on our way and there is still snow up high, great views!

After our wine tasting we continued on to Como. Arriving quite late so we haven’t looked around yet, that happens tomorrow.Read more