I should have said this earlier, but the Ford Cortina car got its name from the Italian town. During the Winter Olympics of 1956, they drove some of them down the bobsled track as a publicity stunt.
We left our hotel late morning, after an argument which I lost about which road to take. I wanted to take a different route out from the one we came in on, but Simon won when Google told us it would involve going back through Trento and add an hour to the trip. What we should have done is take that alternate route when we arrived in Cortina. Never mind. The road out was still beautiful, even if the first hour was just retracing our steps from two days before, including four sets of traffic lights for one way sections of road through tiny mountain towns.
After the first hour it was back onto multi lane tollways, covering 200 k in two hours. Once again, we were baffled by the toll booth as we excited near Verona, and had to be guided by the disembodied voice. The slot we were trying to force the ticket into was where the receipt came out, we had to put the ticket into what looked like the credit card slot. A comparatively mild humiliation, and no one tooted at us.
Our hotel was well situated in the centre of town but unfortunately invisible on a slow drive past, necessitating finding a temporary park and then walking back. Once we’d found it, negotiated the various hidden doors and then found a suitable parking building nearby, we only had time for a quick lunch before a nap.
Lunch was lovely, dining al fresco on the footpath next to the road, out with all the smokers. My eggplant parmigiana was cold in the middle but I didn’t mind as it gave me a chance to say “excuse me, but this is cold” to the waiter in Italian, and when they gave me one heated all the way through it was delicious.
After a nap we wandered down the street to a beautiful pedestrianised area near a park and found a restaurant to have dinner. They gave us the menu in English, Simon ordered the plate of meat which included two styles of tongue, and nerves, as well as the usual sausage and various roasted meats. He turned down the option of “head” which wasn’t brain, so we will never know what sort of meat it would have been.
Our tour guide today said horse meat is a local specialty so who knows if that was also on offer?
Seated next to us was a young American couple. They were extremely loud, they were only talking to each other but we heard everything of their conversation without trying or even wanting to. Their favourite parts of Italy – Venice, by agreement – how well they had mastered the trains, how helpful the hotel concierge had been. It was a relief when they left.
Then a giant Eastern European man arrived with a bunch of friends, equally loud, wanting the wifi password and lots of special drinks and food, and he then spent the evening talking loudly on the phone in English, and watching snippets of videos with the sound on. He had an air of barely suppressed violence so I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to tell him off. Nevertheless, my food was delicious and the waiter said my Italian was very good so I was happy.
Today we had a private guided tour in the morning. Our guide was a quiet, petite, elderly lady, who was born in Verona. She walked us around the old town for three hours. There’s a lot of history here, mostly Roman with an overlay of medieval. The Roman amphitheatre is in very good condition and is used for performances today, with retrofitted stage and seating.
Most of the other Roman ruins are two metres under the current ground level. Verona was under different management multiple times over the centuries, sometimes by the same people more than once (the Lombards and the Austrians, for example). The La Scala dynasty was big in the 14th century, this was when Romeo and Juliet was set. Shakespeare’s play was based on a fictional Italian novel published some decades earlier. When the play came out, tourists started coming to see where the play was set, and so the city decided to play along, saying Romeo lived in this house and Juliet lived over there. The original house they picked for Juliet was too far from the town centre, so they picked one that was just off the market square. Very cynical. It beats me why it’s such a popular place to visit, since the entire concept is entirely made up. Plus, even creepier, there is a statue of Juliet (13 years old, remember) in the courtyard outside her house, you’re supposed to touch her right breast to ensure that you are lucky in love. Thus there is a nonstop parade of tourists waiting to fondle the breasts of the statue. It’s not as if she was lucky in love, either, was she? The coup de grace is the reconstructed balcony. This and the windows were made more period appropriate just last century by none other than our old friend Mussolini. We’ve all heard of Juliet balconies, haven’t we? Well, it turns out that in the play, she wasn’t ever on a balcony. In the famous scene, she’s standing at a window.
There was some ongoing refurbishment of the city in the renaissance, and it has since been known as the painted city, due to all the frescoes. Sadly, these have mostly succumbed to the elements, although the ones up near the roof line have generally survived better. The ones you can see below were renovated thanks to a cash grant from UNESCO.
I’ve been reading in the news about Storm Boris causing widespread death and destruction in Central Europe the past few days, and today apparently there is extensive flooding in Northern Italy. We’ve had nothing but a bit of rain yesterday and it’s been cloudy. I thought we were in Northern Italy, but I suppose there is north and then there is north. We shall see.
