{"id":1169,"date":"2019-01-31T14:53:01","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T14:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1169"},"modified":"2019-01-31T15:57:30","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T15:57:30","slug":"verona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1169","title":{"rendered":"Verona"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re planning a vacation in northern Italy.\u00a0 And you\u2019ll certainly want to spend some time in Venice.\u00a0 Lucky you.\u00a0 As a wine lover, you\u2019d like to do some wine tasting.\u00a0 Right around Venice are Soave and Venetzia-Friuli, both famous for their white wines. \u00a0Oh, but you wanted to taste some major league red wines?\u00a0 In that case, you can drive about an hour and a half west and you\u2019ll be in Valpolicella<\/a>, where you can sip Amarone to your heart\u2019s content.\u00a0 We\u2019d like to suggest that you take more than a day trip and enjoy the pleasures of the main city of Valpolicella, Verona.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an ancient city, as evidenced most of all by the magnificently intact Roman stadium on the grandest of Verona\u2019s wide plazas, the Piazza Bra.\u00a0 They still stage an opera festival there every summer.\u00a0 Even if you can\u2019t get a ticket, it is quite a pleasure sitting in sidewalk caffe on the piazza, sipping a cappuccino and admiring the stadium and other grand buildings of a more modern era.<\/p>\n

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The ancient Roman Arena on the Piazza Bra.<\/em><\/p>\n

In fact, Verona is a city of many wonderful piazzas, much like Venice.\u00a0 The Piazza d\u2019Erbe was the herb market in the Middle Ages.\u00a0 Today it is lined with restaurants, all with tables in the open air.\u00a0 The middle of the square is full of carts selling all sorts of touristy items, most importantly little puppets of Pinocchio, a famous local resident of the past.<\/p>\n

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In many ways, the Piazza d\u2019Erbe is best appreciated at night, when the Renaissance buildings and towers are lit up.\u00a0 It\u2019s a dramatic backdrop for a bowl of spaghetti or big fat pici, the locally popular pasta.\u00a0 (A word of warning about the food in Verona: horse and donkey meat are very popular there.\u00a0 So if you see cavallo<\/em> or asino<\/em> on the menu, think twice.)<\/p>\n

Just beyond the Piazza d\u2019Erbe is the Piazza Seignoria, with a large statue of Dante looming over it.\u00a0 He was a Florentine, but was exiled there for his political views and settled in Verona.\u00a0 The Veronese adopted him quite readily.\u00a0 In those days, Verona was a possession of the Venetians so anyone that Florence was against, Venice was for.<\/p>\n

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Piazza Seignoria, with its statue of Dante.<\/em><\/p>\n

Verona has a special place in the hearts of lovers of Shakespeare\u2019s plays.\u00a0 For one thing, there were the Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/em>.\u00a0 And then there was a notorious feud between two Veronese families, the Montecchi and the Capeletti.\u00a0 You may know them as the Montagues and the Capulets.\u00a0 Today you can visit Juliet\u2019s balcony, where single women have taken to leaving little messages on the wall asking Ms. Capulet to help them find a lover as true as Mr. Montague.\u00a0 In fact, you can have dinner in a restaurant in Romeo\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

As you wander through Verona\u2019s medieval and Renaissance section, you will find a high gate with a clock in it, that turns an ordinary street into a special place.\u00a0 At its base is a bust of Shakespeare with this inscription in both English and Italian:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no world without Verona\u2019s walls, but purgatory, torture, hell itself.\u00a0 Hence, banished is banish\u2019d from the world, and world\u2019s exile is death.\u201d Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene III<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re planning a vacation in northern Italy.\u00a0 And you\u2019ll certainly want to spend some time in Venice.\u00a0 Lucky you.\u00a0 As a wine lover, you\u2019d like to do some wine tasting.\u00a0 Right around Venice are Soave and Venetzia-Friuli, both famous for their white wines. \u00a0Oh, but you wanted to taste some major league red wines?\u00a0 In … Continue reading Verona<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1169"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions\/1193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}