July 25, 2004
Verona is a very nice change of pace from Venice. I encourage anyone making a trip like this one to visit both these cities, in this order. Tourists come mainly for the Romeo and Juliet mythos ("In fair Verona, where we lay our scene"), and so Juliet's house and Juliet's grave are both completely swamped at all times of day, but elsewhere it seems quite un-touristy. Tourists also come for a world-famous opera festival that goes the length of the summer in the old Roman arena.
There are, remarkably, two hostels in Verona, a fair distance from the train station but pleasantly near to the old city, perhaps a ten-minute walk. The larger hostel is in a renovated 16th century villa, complete with a wonderful big garden, and remnants of frescoes lining the common room walls. It also has a dorm room in what I assume was once a banquet hall, from its shape and ability to hold 36 beds (!), and communal showers that only spray cold water, a la municipal swimming pools. Furthermore, there is a 9 to 5 lockout, by far the longest I've seen, and an 11:00 curfew. As some of the hostel guests discovered, not only do you have to be in the building by 11, you have to be in your bed by midnight. A few people decided it was too hot to sleep and tried to move into the garden, which is walled off from the street and only accessible from inside the hostel. The night watchman was not okay with this. A summer-camp-esque scene followed, in which some of the guests tried to hide behind hedges, while the watchman chased others shouting, "Where is your card? You must show me your card!"
Outside of these shenanigans, I had a good time in Verona. I met a Brazilan journalist I rambled around the town with, in search of good photo opportunities and lasagne. The next day we took a day trip to Lake Garda, which is a very big lake in northern Italy. We took the bus to Sirmione, a resort town at the very end of a very long and skinny peninsula, with a castle and Roman ruin in amidst the three and four-star hotels. Unfortunately, we had forgotten to bring swim gear, and it was very hot, so we got the bus back to Verona after about two hours. Then, about ten minutes into the trip, the bus broke down. We had to wait another hour for the next one, ruining our plans to visit some of the Veronese churches (which were closed by the time we returned). We did stop by the Casa di Giulietta before the courtyard closed, and I was glad to do so. While it's considered unlikely that Juliet ever actually lived there, the place is interesting just for what the tourists have done with it. Just walking through the gate one sees that the walls are covered, down to the last square inch, with declarations of love (Timmy loves Tammy, etc.). Many are written on scraps of paper, but many more are written, bizarrely, on wads of chewing gum stuck to the wall. There is also a statue off Juliet that tourists rub for good luck in love (try to guess where).
After only two nights, I felt it was time to move on. After all, I will be back at the end of August for my flight to London (unless I change my ticket). So I took off for Bologna, site of Europe's oldest university, Alma Mater (!). When I got to Bologna I discovered that the youth hostel is a fair bit out of town. It's only about 6 km, but what a 6 km it is: on the bus out there, you go through the edges of town, then across a bridge over a highway, then past a farm and an outlet mall, and there you are at the hostel. I got to the hostel during its lockout, so I had to sit in the courtyard for about an hour. By the time I got checked in, I felt like it was time to eat, but the nearest place to buy food was an enormous supermarket back at the outlet mall. This is normally a ten minute walk, but thanks to construction and a fenced-off bike path, it took me closer to thirty. The whole time I was eyeing the rain clouds amassing about me -- the first I had seen in about two weeks, so not entirely unwelcome, but still -- and then when I got to the supermarket I had the surreal experience of hearing the Offspring's latest single while wandering amidst suburban Italian moms picking out produce. I searched the entire supermarket high and low for peanut butter (no luck), then for a non-corn-flake cereal (again no luck), and finally settled on a 1 kg box of peaches for only 1.10 euro, quite a good price. Then another half hour back to the hostel, and between fatigue and the threat of rain, I decided to call it quits and explore the city the next day.
Tactical error: the next day was Sunday. I got an early start, into town by about 9:30, only to discover that almost nothing is open on Sunday before about 5 p.m., except for museums, churches, and maybe one restaurant in ten. The problem with museums is that you have to pay for most of them, and the problem with churches is that on Sundays people have mass in them, and in Italy it's held in Italian. So maybe I didn't give Bologna a fair shot, but I didn't have that thrilling a time. I did manage to look in on a couple of churches while they weren't in the middle of mass, and spent a while at the easyInternetCafe, my new favorite business establishment.
I also located the university district, and walked around for a while, mainly just to have been there. I made some intersting discoveries. First, unlike in many places, the pavement in Bologna appears to be for some other purpose than making the ground be flat. Also, one of the few things in the entire university that was open on a summer Sunday morning was the university museum. You don't have to pay for it, and inside is just the collection of bizarre stuff you would expect from a 700 year old university: taxidermy displays of blowfish, volcanic rocks, old scientific instruments, intricate wax models used for teaching obstetrics. I also discovered another free museum, this one collecting musical paraphernalia. Evidently a prominent music scholar in Renaissance Bologna decided to collect portraits, manuscripts, scores, and instruments of all the significant musicians and composers of his day. So I now know what Giuseppe Verdi looked like (he had a big white beard and liked to wear hats).
Probably my most significant find in Bologna was a bookstore that actually carries English books on the Italian language. They are suprisingly hard to find. I have had the idea for some time that I might be able to make good progress on learning Italian if I could just figure out the grammar, since many words are like Latin-derived English and I also have my phrasebook. So I picked up "Easy Italian Grammar" and am all set to learn verb conjugations. One interesting fact I learned already is that Italian has a very elaborate suffixing system. Everyone knows about -issimo and -ino (like in bellissimo and bambino), the augmentative and diminuative suffixes. It turns out that there is also a whole class of perjorative suffixes, used to express disdain or repulsion. So, e.g. giallo means "yellow", but giallastro means "a slightly dirty yellow."
Since buses run infrequently on Sunday, I had to head back to the hostel at 8:00, just as things were picking up in town. So I got an early bedtime to get an early start on my next destination: Florence.