Today is a 'rest day', dedicated to wandering around Verona and generally chilling out while discovering the delights of Verona's inner city. Our accommodation is right in the heart of the city, so is proving to be a perfect place for setting foot outside and immediately being assailed by city food outlets, pedestrians, and traffic. It's all a bit chaotic, but, as we know from past experiences, Italian drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are very adept at weaving around each other successfully.
Our ramblings today can be concisely summed up as cruising among the inner byways, window-shopping, stumbling across the odd 2000+ year old Roman bridge, city gate, wall, building, or piazza, and coming to a standstill when the shops started to close soon after midday. It was clearly time to sit down, as everyone else was doing, and have a simple lunch. After enjoying cooler temperatures in the mid-20s during the past week in the Dolomites, the temperature in Verona today was 33 and we have been very quickly reminded of what sticky heat feels like.
 |
| One of the 2000-year-old Roman city gates, Porta Borsari, virtually on our doorstep. |
 |
| One of the main piazzas, Piazza Bra, with Roman wall in the background and palace on the left. |
 |
| Piazza Della Herbe, with monuments and towers. |
 |
| Ornate decorations on the Scaliger Tombs |
Earlier in the morning we'd walked past a nice looking little eatery, set in a smallish alleyway, complete with a signboard displaying the menu of the day. For the extremely reasonable price of 15 Euro there were two courses (and a choice of dishes) on offer, and water, wine and coffee were included in the deal. We took a note of its location and returned to sit down for lunch in the cool shade at 12.30pm. It didn't disappoint. The octopus with tomato and polenta for the second dish was particularly savoury. A great choice - small dishes and very enjoyable.
 |
| A lovely shop display of textiles |
 |
| Old buildings get new lives |
 |
| Streetscapes |
With still a little sightseeing to do, we then wandered down to the river and over the bridge to view the remains of the Roman theatre. It didn't seem necessary to go in, so we just enjoyed the flavour of the area.
 |
| On the opposite side of the river - castle on top and remains of the theatre mid-left. |
And talking about flavours, since we hadn't had a gelato yesterday, and we will be leaving Italy tomorrow, we thought we should make one final assault on Italian gelato. John tried out some licorice and found it had quite a bite!
Back to our nice little room for a little catch-up time. For our off-day today, we found we'd still walked 12km. Unfortunately, the next three days will be pretty much spent in the little car. We're looking at around 16 hours driving, virtually all of it on 130km/hr motorways. It'll be a tough drive.
