Verona’s Magical Old Town: The Northern Italy diaries, Part II

Piazza dei Signori
Gothic spires of the Scaliger Tombs

We now try to do no more than 2 hours driving per day, so we took several days to drive from Venice to Fiesole where we had rented an apartment. Our first stop was Verona.

We were there in the 1980’s and it was one of my all time favorite travel experiences. On a gorgeous summer night we heard La Gioconda in the open air theater in the old Roman amphitheater. It’s not my favorite opera but it was my all time favorite opera experience. The audience was so totally involved in the performance, shouting their approval when they liked what they heard and really shouting their disapproval when they did not. I had never seen such an engaged audience in my life.

This trip there was no time for the opera, but Verona was even more beautiful than I remembered. However, it has turned into a nightmare for drivers. Each time we have gone to Italy we’ve found that the traffic gets worse and worse. The number of cars on the road keeps increasing at a frightening pace and the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. The consequence is horrendous traffic gridlock and practically no parking spaces.

Also, GPS systems are not programmed for the narrow little lanes in the medieval warren of Verona’s old town. Finding our hotel literally took an entire afternoon. It was a charming small hotel but I wouldn’t recommend it as it is on a tiny, well-hidden street and there were no parking spaces within a ten block radius.

If we ever return to Verona, we now know how to do it--get a hotel that has parking on the periphery of old town, park the car for the duration of the stay and do everything on foot.

Verona has one of the most magical old towns in Italy and it was worth all the aggravation. I would love to go back and spend several days there just walking around the old town and hanging out on the many beautiful piazzas.