There is a church, in Florence, called the Basilica di Santa Croce.  As you approach the steps in the afternoon, the red-green-cream tilework of the facade is rich and sundrenched, an homage to the great eighteenth century skin of the Duomo just a few streets away.  Standing guard at the entrance is a ten foot statue crowned with the severe countenance of Dante Aligheiri.  This twelfth century Florentine’s  great respect for the Classics so conflicted his unshakeable Catholicism as to compel him to grant Virgil – banished to purgatory for having the misfortune to have been born before his own Redeemer – the role of Guide through the seven circles of hell toured in his  Divine Comedy.   In this church, entombed side by side, lie the mortal remains of Niccolo Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

I have tried, and failed, to think of any place and time in history where three such men could have been entombed forever together.  If in Athens there were some Olympian temple in which the bones of Pericles, Phideas and Aristotle shared company, that might hold comparison, and yet there were almost two hundred years separating the statesman and the artist from the philosopher.  Here in Florence, in the sixteenth century , these masters of statecraft, of science, and of art were practically contemporaries.  These men who redefined for an entire civilisation leadership;  art; the truth of the universe itself.    Florence was and is a remarkable city.

The view from the train from Venice made good on all the promises that the unprepossessing north of Italy had reneged upon, and unveiled my first glimpse into the the beauty of the Tuscan countryside.   But even then I was unprepared for the Duomo itself.  On my walk down to the famous Ponte Vecchio on my first evening I saw in the rich evening light this masterpiece of Renaissance design, coated in the tri-coloured tilework of later lovers.   The inset sculptures, the richness and intricacy of the facade all demand focus and yet the eye is drawn to the dome, arching overhead so vast that when Michelangelo’s original plans required a timber framework for its completion, he was told that there were not enough trees in all of Tuscany to furnish such a scaffold.  He had drawn inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, but after fifteen centuries, his world no longer possessed the technology to create such a heavenly vault without support.

My walk through the Piazza della Signoria took in the imperious statue of Neptune in his fountain of leaping fish and horses, and of the replica David outside the Uffrizi, but the sun was setting and I got to the bridge just in time.  This was the only crossing on the Arno left standing by the retreating German Army in 1944, convinced by local leadership that its historical significance was more important that its capacity to bear the the advancing British.  The setting sun refracted through billowing cumulus put on the perfect show, and after nightfall I went to bed confident that I’d found the Italy I’d been promised.

You have to be even more pretentious than me to lay claim, even in your wildest moments, to “Florence syndrome”, or “Stendhal syndrome”, named after the 18th Century Viennese visitor to the city who found himself driven almost out of his mind by the profusion of beauty on display on its walls.  Nonetheless, even without the benefit of a Classical education I found myself a little giddy touring the halls of the Uffrizi gallery the next day.  It would take weeks, at least, properly to enjoy all of the extraordinary artworks housed in the galleries of Florence and I fully intend to devote that time to this wonderful town in the future, but on this trip I had time for just two; the Uffrizi and the Galleria dell Accademia.  Just the external porticos of the Uffrizi, viewed while queueing, display sculpture of and by the masters of the Renaissance and before (mainly replicas these days), but inside this is  one of the great repositories of art in the Western world.  In this gallery, in one beautiful frescoed room, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus dominates one wall… and it’s not even the finest artwork in the room.  Not even the finest Botticelli, the prize for which for my money has to go to Primavera, a remarkable allegorical piece which should be read from right to left, showing blue-chilled Zephyr blowing in the new season and mythological beauties greeting her and frolicking in her arrival.  Botanists in the nineties, studying this painting from the 1400s, identified over 200 different species of flowers and plants.  That’s the level of detail in the background.

On a subsequent floor I came face to face with the first woman I ever I loved, or saw naked.  To be fair, I should admit that this might have been in part due to the fact that she was the only unclothed lady visible in the data repository of Encyclopaedia Encarta, (which for younger readers, was the refugee camp assigned to All Of The Information during its brief but turbulent forced relocation from libraries to the Internet.).  On the other hand, whether a symptom of nature or an agent of nurture, it’s notable how many girlfriends since have borne her smooth unhurried curves and beguiling smile.  But I was with her now, and in the flesh Titian’s Venus Of Urbino, glorious in her demure inviting nudity, made doubly-naked by the flurry of maidservant activity behind her, looks peremptorily  but teasingly out from her frame, clearer and more captivating than any JPEG has ever had the right or the wherewithal even to hint at.  I stood there for fully fifteen minutes by the clock.

A couple of rooms later, Caravaggio’s startling take on the head of the Gorgon trapped horrifically in Perseus’ shield was enough to snap me out of my reverie, and not long afterwards, three hours after entering the gallery, I emerged blinking into the sunlight.  No time to stop and stare though, on to see Dave.  This was Sunday, after all, and Italy (along with France as an ill-fated trip to Dijon last year taught me) closes on a Monday.  So I had to get to the David before the gallery closed.  The long line moved ponderously slowly, enlivened only a little by the chatter of fellow Anglophone backpackers around me, but after an hour and a half and a pomegranate slushie, I was in.

No room for excuses here: I assumed this would be a box-ticking exercise.  We all know what he looks like, I’ve even seen him animated ridiculously by Terry Gilliam; frankly I didn’t think this trip was going to give me anything other than bragging rights.  “I’ve seen Michelangelo’s David”.  Well, I have, and he really is a long drink of water.  Exquisitely curated, situated under natural light in the domed finale of a long corridor, he stands, thoughtfully disinterested in, but towering magnificently above, the unworthy and bulbous mortals who throng and waddle and chatter in his shadow.  Polished from a single piece of unblemished stone, Michelangelo’s masterpiece of contraposto shows this lithe young man in the moment his weight is shifted onto his supporting leg, with forward momentum imminent but trapped forever in the marble.  This technique, rediscovered from the Greeks for whom its invention differentiated their Classical work from its static Egyptian predecessors, is one of the things which gives Renaissance sculpture its vibrancy and life – that and a certain morbid curiosity on the part of its leading lights with the intricacies of the human musculo-skeletal system, learned illegally in crypts and charnel-houses always under threat of discovery and excommunication.  David bears all of that accuracy of the learned and preternaturally talented sculptor, but also the caress of a lover.  His youth, seen up close, might be rather troubling to a modern eye, but there is no doubting the purity of the adoration which crafted his long smooth biceps, his taught abdomen, his adolescently powerful thighs and buttocks.  He is shockingly beautiful, captivating in a way no photograph or video could convey.

After all that homo-eroticism I needed a bit of a lie down, so it wasn’t until the next day that I ascended the dome of the Duomo.  500-odd steps (yes, they are odd – whoever heard of a square spiral staircase?) lead first to the vertiginous walk around the inside of the dome, where scenes of ascension contrast with a hellscape that puts one in mind of Blake at his most laudanum-inspired, and then up out into the sunlight.   Florence is quietly beautiful from above, far smaller than Paris or Rome and lacking the headline-grabbing architecture (as is so often the case with good panoramas, you’re standing on the thing you’d most like to be included in the view) but it’s consistently pretty wrapped in its terracotta pashmina, with sporadic churches and galleries to catch the eye.  Upon descending I went to pay my triple-respects at Santa Croce, and then on to the station, and the train to Rome.

I had too short a time in Tuscany.  I wanted to see Pisa and to visit Cincqueterra.  There was wine country to explore and the sea to see.  There are another two dozen galleries and churches I should like to have seen in Florence itself, not to mention the famous market, and the shopping and food here begged for another visit with a far more flexible budget.  I entirely understand the English upper-middle-class’s obsession with this part of the world, and (as long as I can avoid them all) I’ll be back very soon indeed.

There is something fantastical about Venice.  A city without roads, a great historical power built on pontoons, an island of islands… the city of St Mark, one cannot help but feel, should not exist in this world.  It should be in Middle Earth, or Earthsea, or Westeros, and there the Doges in stately robes would reign still.  But here it sits, in our world in our time… and really, I’m very ambivalent about it.

When I walked down the steps from the train station I was truly swept up in it.  Fizzingly excited.  The water laps at the steps of the pavement!  It comes right up!  🙂 This is Venice, uncontrollably pretty in the setting sun, with sleek slim wooden-hulled boats passing clunky water taxis as tourists dined and drank in side streets.  And that… vision… of Venice did indeed persist for me throughout all four days, but only intermittently.  So from time to time upon rounding a corner onto an utterly deserted backstreet, nothing but canal and moored gondolas and window boxes overflowing with flowers… yes, it is achingly beautiful, a watercolourist’s dream.  Everywhere there are specks and sparks of genuineness and loveliness; in the wrought iron of a barrier, in the flickering standard lamps of a pavement cafe reflected in the rippling canal at twilight.  The view back to San Marco from the Lagoon, or over it from the Campinile.   And certainly in the art and the real history, all of which was humbling in its scale and magnificence.

But overlaid across it all, like the faintly soiled sheet which sours an otherwise luxurious hotel room, is tourist Venice.  The place where the waiter’s face makes it clear that “and a glass of tap water, please” sounds uncannily like an admission of vile and twisted depravities performed upon the corpse of his dear departed grandmother.  The two hundred shops selling Chinese-made carinvale masks.  The place where spaghetti carbonara, a meal which must cost all of 80p to make, costs E15 to eat.  A place of gondola rides which in the flesh are simply the stupidest, naffest things I have ever seen – stripey shirts and straw boaters and gurning tourists trying to pretend they’re having a romantic time while the sweaty, bored, cynical Italian with the punt shouts over their head to other canal users whose wake threatens to drown the whole enterprise.  E12 or more for every single museum or gallery, and even the churches charge admission.  Everyone in Venice wants your money, and all of it, and everyone who works in Venice knows you have no option but to part with it.  That’s it.  Finally.  I have been looking for the right paradigm for this for literally weeks: A mark.  That’s what I felt like in Venice.  A conman’s mark. I’d retitle the post A mark in St Mark’s Square now, but I like the Doc Brown quote too.

So that’s Venice for me.  Picturesque, otherworldly, at times achingly romantic.  But grabby, swivel-eyed, presumptuous and arrogant.  I think also, Venice is a place for lovers, or rather, Venice is a place for the in-love, which doesn’t have to be the same thing at all.  Case in point: I was joined for this leg of my trip by a fearsomely bright and very lovely young psychologist named Zoe, a friend and sometime lover, and while we had a very enjoyable time together, that is not I think a dynamic best suited to bring out Venice’s charms.  The city requires a total suspension of disbelief towards it, and total immersion in each other; not the friendly sarcasm and caginess of the ill-defined relationship.  Nonetheless, as I say, we had a lovely if rather expensive time and it’s a place truly unlike any other.

I arrived accidentally, thinking the train was going to deposit me off the island (where I’d booked a hostel), so my first night in Venice was spent making it up as I went along, chatting and drinking with some pretty Americans, and eventually sleeping on the street.  I must say, if you’re going to sleep on the streets – and I’m not an expert – a quiet backstreet in Venice in late June, with music playing in the distance and, beneath you, the teasing water slapping playfully against the crumbling foundations of its longsuffering partner, is not the worst hardship a man can endure.

The bus ride to and from the airport was, however, more comfortable even than the quayside, and the hotel Zoe had booked in San Marco was a fantastic little find – once we actually found it.  “Labyrinthine”, “warren”, “maze”… none of these quite capture the Stygian experience of trying to navigate the pathways and canals of San Polo and San Marco when you have some place to get to.  When you don’t, it’s a delight.  You wander this way and that, laughing, admiring architecture and bridges and waterways, eating gelato in the sunshine.  When you do have to be somewhere, and worse still by a certain deadline, you don’t meander hand in hand by the canal, you threaten to push each other in it.  You don’t drip gelato down your shirt and laugh playfully, you sweat right through your shirt and grimace.  You don’t get joyously lost in tiny picturesque alleyways, you just get lost.  Oh, here’s better vocabulary with which to describe Venice’s streetplan: A. Fucking. Nightmare.

Anyway, the hotel was right off St Mark’s Square and it was lovely, a phenomenal bargain.  That day we splurged on a glass of prosecco in the shadow of the Basilica, toured the Doge’s palace, had a canalside dinner and experienced acqua alta in St Mark’s Square as a lightening storm ravaged the sky.  The highlight of the Doge’s Palace for me were undoubtedly the council rooms, rather than the Bridge of Sighs; to be honest I found the latter rather uninspiring both inside and out.  But the vast rooms of real power within the palace, the Collegio, the Sala Consiglio dei Dieci, and the Sala della Bussola, made me exclaim aloud.  These are cavernous chambers where councils would meet, audiences would be granted, where Dukes and Cardinals would plot and scheme and plan.  Their gilt-framed ceilings and walls overwhelm you with vast scenes of metaphor and history, countless works by Tintoretto and Veronese gazing down from amidst flowing lilac robes and radiant golden skin.  This is the apotheoses of Venetian art framing the zenith of Venetian power, and it succeeds in humbling the visitor.

That evening, after dinner, we tried to walk back to our hotel and couldn’t.  Between us and our destination, across the whole width and length of St Mark’s, the waters of the Veneto had come up in a brazen attempt to reclaim the land, and submerged the square to a height of six inches.  This tidal phenomenon is called acqua alta, and while severe events are rare and can be disruptive and even dangerous, this was just a delightful and unexpected experience.  We took off our shoes and splashed through the tepid water while overhead, roiling greyblack clouds were picked out and pierced every two seconds by spear after torturously branching spear of forked lighting.  In one of the square’s restaurants, the orchestra played classical music culminating in Nessun Dorma, and with our backs to the Basilica we were enclosed on three sides by the thousand lightbulbs of the balconies and collonades of the square: three brilliant unbroken lines shining down on us and three shimmering wavering reflected rows beneath our feet, glittering back up in a myriad angles in the wake of a hundred feet.  We took two dozen photographs, none of which came out.

The storm lasted all that night and the following day, so we stayed indoors and toured the Basilica and Il Frare.  I am choosing not to be upset by scaffolding, because it’s that or hang my head in my hands.  At the time of writing, extraordinary sights which have been at least partially marred by renovations include: the Duomo in Milan, St Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Florence, the Collusseum and the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and the Parthenon itself.  So you simply have to look past it.  There is a reason these places all look so good and are all still in once piece [or as many pieces or fewer as they were in fifty years ago], and if you have any kind of imagination at all, you’re only using what’s in front of you to recreate what was there hundreds or thousands of years ago anyway.  If my mind’s eye can add walls and a roof, it can erase some iron pipes.  Nonetheless, the outside of St Mark’s Basilica was particularly hard to visualise as it would look in its pomp, since opaque netting covered the scaffolding in front of the domes at centre and stage-right.  Inside was a different story: extraordinary gilted mosaics and that much-sought-after sense of space and lightness created by the domes themselves.  It was though extra for the guided tour, and extra to climb the tower, and three percent for lookin’ in the mirror twice, so we didn’t see it all.  In the afternoon Il Frare was better value for money.

An imposing Gothic structure, this church boasts some of the greatest works of art in the city, including statues depicting both creeping skeletons and hulking slaves but especially, over the alter, one of the most arresting Titians I have ever had the good fortune to gaze upon, which I did for some time.  The Assumption stands over twenty feet tall, framed by the domed gothic window, and the Virgin swathed in the rich velvety red of the Renaissance’s greatest colourist, steps from a cloud which divides the temporal and spiritual into a sky of shining, metamorphic gold.  It was here that I was struck by the extent to which Italian churches are as much art gallery as place of worship.  Again and again in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, extraordinary works by history’s true greats are hung not in museums or galleries but in the cathedral or church which commissioned them, five hundred years ago.  As an Englishman I had no experience of this; it occurred that perhaps the difference is that here in Italy, there was no power which could rob the Church of its treasures: the church was the power in the land.  So on its walls and in its hands these extraordinary works remain, dedications to the Son, or the Virgin, the Spirit or the Saints, but a reminder also of the wealth and influence and patronage of the Diocese, the Cardinals, the Church.

The island of Murano, which we visited the following day, is an altogether nicer experience than San Marco or San Polo, Venice’s central islands.  Venice is architecturally very busy: narrow streets and thin canals abutted by four and five storey buildings.  There is a lot going on in a small footprint.  Murano takes that idea, takes away the crowds, grips the edges, and stretches and smooths the surface like kneading a thin and crispy Italian pizza.  The canals grow wider, the buildings reduce to less imposing, less frenetic proportions.  You can see more sky, and walk four abreast while you’re doing it.

Murano is of course famous for its glass, much of which is… well, horrible.  Ungainly shapes and overbright colours, necklaces which would give you a hunch and candlesticks whose headpieces should remain forever unlit lest they illuminate the clunky, primary-hued disaster below.  We did find some absolutely beautiful pieces while window shopping though, including some of the finest, most delicate, gold-laced wine glasses in existence, each one of which sold for over four hundred euros.  Well, sold perhaps, but not to us.  And we got to watch the seemingly alchemical process by which rich orange-red malleable glass, heated to 1200degrees until it glows bright and opaque, is fashioned and blown into intricate translucent shapes by skilled hands whose techniques have barely changed in the centuries since glass-blowing was confined for safety on this island 700 years ago.  The Museum of Glass was worth the half-price admission for being half-closed-for-repair, with the examples of ancient Roman glass (yes, apparently, – I had no idea either!) worth a visit on their own.   We soaked up the sun on the ferry back to San Marco, then enjoyed the views of Venice bathing in it, from the top of the Campinile.  On a cloudless scorching day Venice looks almost peaceful from a height of 80 metres.

An eventful few hours later, we were seated in the Roman Arena in Verona awaiting the start of Carmen.  If holiday memories are best glossy, travel writing is better honest, so perhaps it is worth briefly recording the ghastly, short-tempered, forty-minute trek to the station which was the inspiration for my description of Venice’s sidestreets above.  I should probably record the purchase of the train tickets with less than a minute to spare, to a soundtrack of frustrated shouting and wounded good intentions and a backdrop of terrified Venetians standing well back from my ticket machine.  Certainly the ticket inspector, who upon discovering that we had failed to validate our ticket at the station,  suggested helpfully that we should have purchased tickets for the 6.12pm train prior to 6.12pm in order to have time to process them properly, deserves a special mention, as does the fact that I didn’t throw him out the window.

But we got to Verona on time in the end, and had forgiven each other and started speaking again by the time the performance started.  This was of course the extra show of the performance I’d missed the previous weekend, and it was so much more fun for Zoe being there to share it with.  The atmosphere crackled as the sun sank behind the Roman walls, and I was absolutely overwhelmed when a cast of almost two hundred, including half a dozen dressage-trained horses, took the stage for the opening number.  The whole thing was a remarkable, unforgettable spectacle, although I’ll admit that three hours in, when technically it was now tomorrow and we’d now had the third intermission, I was starting to become as aware of my buttocks as of the stage, protected as they were from ancient stone by only an uncomfortable inflatable cushion.  I did though get to meet some of the cast during that intermission, who were the sexiest gypsies I’ve ever seen.

We killed the time between the end of the show and the first train of the new day with coffee and gelato in the piazza, a stroll through the deserted halflit streets of Verona at 3am, and a nap in the train station.  Our final day in Venice was spent swimming and sunbathing (and sleeping) on the Lido, that long thin sandbar island which is sliced into dozens of private beaches and a couple of public ones of which our choice, Blue Moon, is perhaps the best known.  The sand is ochre, the water is cool but clean, and although Zoe thought the beach was busy, in comparison to my most recent point of reference – Copacobana – it was practically deserted.  We had a chilled out day and enjoyed a delicious seafood lunch including a new experience for me – cuttlefish in its own ink, superb – at prices much more human than in San Marco.

Zoe left the following morning and I walked the now-familiar route to the station, across the trekked off to catch the train for Florence which was… fully booked.  So I bought a ticket for the 6pm train and spent another afternoon in Venice, walking all over Santa Croce and the Dorsuduro, and found there some small part of the tranquility and verisimilitude I’d been searching for, and which I’d found so lacking around St Mark’s Square and in the Rialto.  I walked right down to the striking dome of the Santa MAria della Salute, which commands the view from the whole of the quay of San Marco, and then chose the Gallerie dell’Accademia over the Peggy Gugenheim museum because, called me a bluff old traditionalist, but I still prefer Giotti and Bellini to Yoko Ono and Jackson Pollock.  It is arguably Venice’s finest gallery, with with a superb and lively Tintoretto – Creation of the Animals – and it provided me the full knockout impact of the three majestic domes and glistering gold mosaics of the Basilica which the scaffolding had denied me, in the form of a stunning Bellini set in St Mark’s Square.   After a peaceful air-conditioned couple of hours I stepped back into the sun and the heat, and followed the course of the Canal Grande around to the station, where I pushed through the throngs of the Pride Parade (it’s quite hard to convey both “yeah! down with the Catholic Right!” and “get out of my way” with nothing but body language.  I fear I may have failed.) Finally, remembering to validate my ticket, I boarded the train for Florence.

Right.  Here I sit, drinking terrible wine which tastes like watered down ouzo, eating stuffed vine leaves, shaded from the Greek sun in a pavement cafe at the very foot of the Acropolis.  This morning I stood on the steps of the Parthenon, and sat in the Agora where Plato learned at the feet of Socrates.  Much has happened since last we spoke.

Verona is a very attractive city, but a short story.  I arrived in the early evening, bubbling with excitement for my night at the opera in the Roman Arena.  My hostel lay between the train station and the Arena, so I stopped off for a shower, excitedly explaining to the helpful young lady who checked me in that I tickets for tonight’s performance and she said…

“There is no performance tonight”.

I said “no, I have a ticket”.  She said “It was last night, the opera” .

Confidence and ebullience drained as if through some hideous surgical valve, and I mumbled something about having to check and slunk to my room.  I checked my gmail.  The tickets – I’d bought two, more’s the hubris, imagining that with a day in Verona it’d be an easy and cute way to whip up a date for the evening – were for the Saturday night.  Last night.  I cross-referenced the itinerary on this blog – it said Sunday.  I’d written it down wrong when creating the itinerary, and then only referred to this blog rather than to the emailed tickets.  I had managed to bugger this up two months in advance.   That’s really post-graduate incompetence.

This stuff is hard to stomach, and harder to put into words.  It’s not the end of the world, I know, but I’m good at this… bad at this.  I have form at this, I mean, which means my self-critical faculties leap into overdrive when given yet another opportunity for mockery ridicule and self-derision.  I have a psychologist friend who defines my personality type as “fragile narcissist” (which believe me feels just as vinegary to hear as it does to read) but in layman’s terms I choose to believe it means “self-confident… mainly”.  Certainly, choosing to have a high opinion of one’s own abilities does mean that the wounds inflicted on the ego by basic or foolish mistakes… well, they really do sting.  But, these things happen, one tells oneself.  And – turnabout being fair play – a maternal grandparent deserves a namecheck here.  My mother’s mother, a redoubtable woman by the name of June Sinclair, nicknamed me the Absent-Minded Professor at the age of about eight years old, and as long as I keep her sage perspicacity in mind, I’m less likely to fall prey to delusions, not of grandeur, but of worldly competence.  Which also means I can bear frequent proof of its lack with a self-aware shrug rather than a self-loathing fist through the wall.  You can work on self-improvement – and I really am – but sometimes it helps to know who you really are.

So yeah… search “the west wing we changed times zones” on youtube to see the Aaron Sorkin version of what happened first… but eventually I calmed down and turned on the wifi to discover there was an additional performance of Carmen laid on for the coming Thursday, and I booked two tickets.  I’d be in Venice, with Zoe, the trip was doable and I wouldn’t have to miss out completely.  Then I read a book, texted some friends, and went to sleep.

I enjoyed Verona, the following day.  The Arena isn’t awe-inspiring in it’s scale (although the prices of the piazza’s restaurants are in theirs) but it’s remarkable in its preservation.  The more I learn about the ancient world, the more respect I have for ruins – well-preserved and otherwise.  Just think about the wars, the sieges, the famines, the sheer historical space filled up with ignorance and prejudice and poverty and humanity; and still something survives.  In 1687 the Parthenon, as I learned today, was hit with a direct cannonball strike while it was being used as a gunpowder magazine by occupying Turkish forces.  THAT is the scale of what we’re up against.  Think about beautiful 1920s picture houses in London torn down to make car parks, or even for reasonable housing requirements.    In that context, think of the aspiring landowner in 450AD who wants to build a home for his family… and this weed-strewn ancient unmarked unused ruin down the street is doing nothing but offering its cut stone, unguarded.  Nobody knows who built it or why. Nobody cares.  But it survives.  It has to be lucky every time, vandals and thieves and enemy canon and earthquakes only have to be lucky once.  And yet still, it survives.

So I enjoyed the Arena, and the Museo di Castelvecchio, where a fourteenth century fort, less fortunate in the face of Allied bombardment, has been lovingly and partially reconstructed into a charming museum housing statues from antiquity and Renaissance art including an explosively colourful Veronese.  From there I walked through wide well-cobbled streets showcasing Italian fashion, and pretty narrow streets offering everything from metalwork to artisanal cheeses, to the Ponte Pietra and then up many maaaany steps to the Castel San Pietro, too new to be worth entrance itself, but commanding charming views of the river and of the city of Romeo and Juliet.

My overriding impression of Verona was one of attractive dilapidation.  Walls flaking paint, plaster, even bricks are far more abundant than their less memorable and better kept counterparts.  Shutters on windows which once were dark green or deep blue are now sunbleached wood with only a hint or a memory of past perfection.  It is a charming town; unremarkable in many ways, but genteel, and lovely.  I left in in better spirits than I might have imagined possible the previous evening, and headed for Venice.