A visitor from a foreign land

Last weekend my friend Emily, a Cornell student currently studying in Paris, stopped by for the weekend along her Europe tour on one of her vacations.  She got in late on Thursday after spending the day in Slovenia, and on Friday went on her own to Florence.  That evening, we went with the BCSP program to explore the underground of the Salaborsa library, home to some neato ancient ruins.  Our tour guide was of course speaking in Italian so I had to translate for Emily.  Contrary to what our Cornell friends might expect, I did not use this opportunity to invent a false and bizarre history to tell her instead of what was actually being said.  I'm not entirely sure why I didn't.

There are ancient Roman things ten minutes from my home.  I'm cool with that.

The next day, we had plans to meet some friends at the station to ride to Parma, where we would explore a museum devoted to prosciutto.  Stop salivating.  Anyway, we unfortunately missed the train we were aiming for and ended up coming a few hours later with my neighbor and gelato partner Caroline, while on the train we planned all the parties the three of us were going to invite each other to back at school next year.  We arrived in Parma and managed to misinterpret or mistime the bus schedules there twice, and never made it to that legendary museum.  We plodded around Parma a bit, and strolled in the Ducal Gardens (the duke says hello) before taking the train back.

The next day Emily, Caroline and I took the train to Verona.  Verona is a really neat city.  There's a very strong German influence there, and many of the signs were in both Italian and German.  The Alps are visible from the high points in the city, there are several gelaterie on every street, and everything was extremely clean- no graffiti!  The first thing we went to--and because it was the first Sunday of the month, every site we saw was just one euro--was the coliseum.

The coliseum was really neat.  The entire thing is intact, unlike a certain Roman one I could mention, and visitors are free to peril the banisterless steps to climb the entire thing.  I couldn't find any evidence for this online, but I'm fairly certain that Monty Python filmed the coliseum scene in Life of Brian right there.  The view from the top is great, and once Caroline or Emily posts their pictures of us (I swore I got more pictures of people on this trip, but I was wrong) I'll show you the silly posed ones of us fighting.

So, other than the coliseum, there isn't really that much to see in Verona.  Oh wait, what's this?

Could it be?

Oh man.

YES.  WE HAVE A CASTLE.

Verona's got a castle, with a moat, and a museum has been seamlessly integrated with the whole thing, allowing me to explore every nook and cranny, plotting my eventual conquest of the place as Caroline did her art-history-expert thing with Emily.

Verona is also home to Romeo and Juliet-related sites, but seeing as that's all fictional those felt kind of fake, like visiting 221B Baker Street to report a crime or stopping by 4 Privet Drive to play quidditch, and the fact that that's what most of the tourists are there for makes these sites very tacky.  The tunnel to "the balcony" covered in love notes was sort of endearing, but the tomb of the actual Capulets, marred on every possible surface with "X+Y 4EVER" graffiti was not.  My feelings about graffiti, after living in Bologna, are that vandals should get a month of imprisonment for every 50 years the thing they mark up has been in existence.

Verona was my favorite day-trip city so far.  It's got a coliseum, a castle, more gelato then you could ever want, and is impeccably clean.  It doesn't FEEL very touristy, but it is underneath--I noticed that everything was open despite it being Sunday, which is the opposite of the very untouristy Bologna.

Sorry for the delay in posts- I was waiting for the others' pictures that haven't been posted yet.  I'll put some better ones up when they emerge.