A night at the opera. The best of the sights. Gothic fantasies and Renaissance dreams. Beautiful bridges, elegant piazzas and atmospheric churches. Where to eat, sleep and drink. The world's most famous lovers. Tasty trattotias and trendy cocktail bars. What to do- from wine tasting to windsurfing. Kid's stuff. Art, arias and a lady selling artichokes...
This guide to the city of Verona and its surroundings is written and researched by Julius Honnor.
With a spectacular 20,000-seat performance space in the very heart of the city, Verona has become justly famous for its summer opera season. Enormous, lavish productions take place every night during the summer months, the audience sitting with candles on the original Roman stone seats of the amphitheatre. Outside of the opera season the Arena is also used for pop concerts. The Roman theatre to the north of the river stages some top-notch theatre productions and there's a varied musical programme of modern, classical and jazz at other locations around the city. Balancing out Verona's somewhat staid reputation, the university influences a more youthful and vibrant side to the arts scene, and there's alternative music and art to be found, too.
Verona is more than just the sum of its arts. The city is an important trade centre and more goods now pass through its venerable old portals than the port of Genoa. Wine is also key to the city's wealth. The vine carpeted slopes of the Valpolicella and Soave regions rise up on either side of the city, which, not surprisingly, plays host to Vinitaly , the country's top wine fair. Olives, too, grow in abundance in the fecund hills to the north, east and west, while, to the equally fertile south, beyond a sprawling industrial area, the Po plain is an enormous patchwork of crop-yielding fields.
The crasser side of Verona's tourism centres on a bizarrely contrived Romeo and Juliet trail around a series of fictional sites. The city's real and multi-layered history, meanwhile, is more interesting, and apparent everywhere you turn. From the Romans to Mussolini via an unlikely 4th-century African patron saint, and the great artists and architects of the Renaissance, Verona's streets, houses, churches and piazzas combine to tell the fascinating story of this small, but hugely significant, northern Italian city.
Text © Julius Honnor 2005,
from Footprint Verona
ISBN 1903471850 , Published 2004. 256 Page; £6.99.