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.