Verona: A Romantic Comedy Of Errors!

Rory here -  Verona is proving to be a rather remarkable stopover on our journey. We took Iris's lead on this one. She recently saw Verona in a movie, a love story, so maybe love has brought us here. That, and a growing frustration for Iris that we were making all the decisions, which after all is the usual way of the world -- parents call and kids respond -- but this world is a little different. So we ditched plans for Siena and headed northeast away from Cinque Terre (chink-way tare-ay) for our one foray outside Tuscany and Rome. Our hosts in  Montepulciano had looked puzzled at the trade-off when we told them of the change of plans. Siena is famously beautiful. They encouraged us to at least visit the mediaeval town of Sabbionetta, en route to Verona: a lovely very old town, they said, and still intact much as it was when it was built by order of a 16th century duke with a vision of utopia. We took the bait. But utopia is over-rated and naturally bound to disappoint. It started before we arrived. The road to utopia was cut short when we arrived at the bridge that would takes over a small river and on to utopia. The bridge was being repaired and we were turned back. The detour was about twenty minutes too long, redeemed only by the curiosity of driving nice winding narrow paved roads, elevated on dykes about three metros above the surrounding tiny farms. The road divided the farms into irregular shapes and suggested regular flooding of the area, but begged the question: what of all the little farm houses down there and all the little farm people in them? Never mind, on to utopia, where probably there are no floods nor other problems.  The real trouble with utopia is that it simply can't last. And so we arrive, four, five hundred years later and it's virtually a ghost town. Just about the only people we see are the men gathered in a local sidewalk caffe bar, talking among themselves, perhaps about nothing, or the same old thing, or maybe utopia or Thomas More, who knows, and paying special attention to the sight of a Canadian woman passing through view on the other side of the street. There's little else to keep us in Sabbionetta, except hunger which is met with a less than ideal lunch (though, admittedly, a rather spectacular pineapple sorbet) and so we soon hightail it to Verona.
Verona turns out to be sort of a perfect destination at this point in our trip. The old city has a rather grand boulevard that passes through arches and gates and around vast circles of traffic, like all the great European cities, funnelling into a carless historic centre with a rare tree-lined piazza looking up at the impressive ancient Roman Arena. It's like a small, relaxed, clean Rome. Some would bristle at the thought, but a little Roman chaos goes a long way and these travelers are happy to walk on cobbled streets that are so clean they shine, and happy to sit in Piazza Bra' for a relaxing hour with no thoughts of pickpockets and hustlers.
(By the way, Rome is brilliant.) 

We spotted a poster for an opportunity missed by mere days. Stevie Wonder played the Verona Roman Arena just days before we arrived. That would be a great evening for anyone, even those of our friends who can't stand Stevie Wonder. For the serious set, though, there's opera under the stars and we have just bought tickets for tonight's staging of Madama Butterfly. We just saw Puccini's hometown Lucca, now we'll see his most beloved opera -- in an ancient stone arena, apparently designed for excellent outdoor acoustics, and with a bottle of wine and a bottle of limonata, can't wait. The coolest thing is this. The opera runs in repertory, with a different one each night: Butterfly, Aida and two others. To strike the set, the crew must lift giant set pieces out of the arena by a crane a and a put a them a down a in a da piazza. (Sorry). So we walk through Piazza Bra'
among giant pagodas and sphinxes and pharaohs and whatnot, all surrounding an ancient stone colosseum that appears to be crumbling, and some of it looks fake and some of it looks real and it's all completely surreal and wonderfully discombobulating. It looks like terrorists finally targeted Disney and hit their mark. About time. 
Between forays into the old city, we drive out to our pastoral digs at Corte Boaria.
That's bovaria with a 'v' that eventually just went away. Cowland. We're in an agriturismo motel. Bizarre. Wonderful. Our hosts have kiwi orchards, vegetable gardens, ducks that will snap at your ass if you don't watch it, and a kind gentleman farmer who works with them and shows up with a rustic little harvest basket full of the best hairless peaches we could ask for. Not nectarines, mind you -- pescas (peshas). And we didn't even ask. We're out in the country, but we take our car fifty metres along this tight little country road between fields and orchards and a grotesque vision appears and rises and swells before us:


It is GALASSIA Verona UNO, a mall to challenge any you have ever seen. Garish huge signs and billboards high atop the galassia, and modern chic everything in air-conditioned comfort inside.  They call it a hypermarket. It's actually a welcome change from one darn picturesque mediaeval hilltop town after another -- it gets harder and harder to tell them apart -- but we hustle out of there because really, you see one, you've seen the mall. We're here for Verona and we're here for love. Romeo e Giulietta. Back into the walled city for more.
Last night we stayed too long, admiring the night lit Arena, enjoying a fine pizza Veronese and chicory rocket salad (radicchio and arugula in abundance in this crazy country) and the passing parade. Forgot to either buy a map of the town, or ask directions, or actually remember how we got into town in the first place. So we deserved to get lost. And we'd had too much fun, so we deserved to get cranky. After stubbornly driving in circles for forty-five lousy minutes, determined to beat this one on our own, we finally submitted to a hotel front desk somewhere in the nether regions of outer Verona. A clerk with a good but belated chance for a part in a Fellini movie offered to help us in his best broken English. There's no way he'd have heard of Corte Boaria, so we asked for directions to GALASSIA Verona UNO and said we could find our way from there. surely everyone knows the GALASSIA. He looked at us like we were crazy and said it was much too late, the mall is now closed. Chiuso. (Cue-so). We said no, just direct us to the mall, we can find our way from there. He said, where you from? Canada? Maybe in Canada you malls open late, not Italy. We said, no, we don't want to go shopping, just direct us to -- and then an American voice cut in. Grisly and tired looking, dude said, how far is it? We guessed (or lied) and said ten minutes. He said, I've got a GPS in my car, let's go, follow me. We went for a joy ride in hot pursuit of his little sports car, u-turns and all, as are generally involved with GPS when you punch in start and finish points and request SHORTEST ROUTE. And we were home in no time. God bless the dude.