Juliet rhymes with Capulet, but Romeo doesn’t rhyme with Montague. Apparently, the story of Shakespeare’s “star crossed lovers” is ever present in the minds of people from Verona. Honestly, it was not his best play. Heck, it wasn’t even his best play set in Verona. Still, it’s the most famous. Every kid in every ninth grade class ever has read about (or heard the Cliff notes of) Romeo and Juliet. Warring families produced two kids who fell in love, despite the Hatfields-versus-McCoys situation happening around town. Juliet pretends to kill herself with a potion that makes her appear dead, assuming Romeo will come to her, and she will wake to run off with him. He comes to her, but thinks she’s dead, so he kills himself. She wakes up to a dead sweetheart, so she kills herself, too. Everybody dies. Romantic, no?
The big draw in Verona is, apparently, Juliet’s balcony, or Giulieta’s balcony, in local spelling. I saw it in the ‘90s, and since Cas and Jeff had both seen it, we all persuaded Reema (without a whole lot of effort) that it wasn’t that big of a deal. Instead, we went for pizza and wine. Following that, we went hat shopping. I was the only one who was on the lookout for a new hat, as I didn’t feel good about packing my hats from home into luggage. Still, having Cas, Jeff and Reema on my fashion team let me pick a hat that worked with my face, as well as my style.
Our time in Verona was capped off (see what I did there,?) with a trip to a gelato shop where we had a treat, found a restroom and refilled our water bottles. All in all, not bad for about three bucks a cone.
From there, we boarded the bus and headed to the spot where our bus drove up on to a ferry boat. Our ferry boat was a lot of fun- as we rode into Venice, the majority of the interesting, historical things were on the left. We were told that at the outset, so we sat on the left. Then the boat turned around so the other side became the left. Dagnabbit. So we moved around a bit and fount that the best vantage point with the maximum shade was actually in the font of the thing. There we stood with our hair in the breeze until we got to the city proper. We boarded out bus while it was on the ferry boat, then we drove to the restaurant where we were scheduled to have dinner.
The dinner was fantastic, though Cas and I were, for the first time, at a different table than Jeff and Reema. We ended up getting a little bit of a different perspective, just by sitting with other people. It was truly a great meal, and it was nice to get to know other folks in our tour group.
When that ended, we got to our historic hotel. It’s a protected building by whatever historic society runs these sorts of things, and thats cool, but we sure would have liked an elevator. Nevertheless, if you can swing a tour with porter service, you should do that. It’s pretty great when someone else moves your luggage to your room.
When we got here, Cas and I walked across the street to the Adriatic Sea and dripped our feet in the sand. Had to be done. Then, we came back to the hotel and had a few glasses of wine in the courtyard. Jeff came by, as Reema was already asleep.. It was, overall, a pretty great day. Tomorrow is Jeff’s birthday, and we plan to celebrate. We will accomplish this by doing some very Venice things. Not sure what those are yet, but you’ll find out just after I do.
In the meantime, here is a photo of Cas, looking lost in thought in front of a statue of Dante Allegheny, who also looks lost in thought. I thought a lot of this picture in fact.
Here are the rest of our photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PR6jn1ZzhDS6cx8q8
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