Verona and Milan

After Venice I turned west to take in Milan and eventually the south coast of France. But first an afternoon stopover in Verona. The reason was of course that this was the setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and I was curious about the city. This is the Portoni della Brà (page in Italian). The eponymous piazza is on the other side. Aside from brighter paint on the building, it hasn't changed much, looking at a recent photo.

This is the Verona Arena, one of the best preserved structures of its kind and still in use today.

The guide book mentioned Juliet's tomb. I couldn't find it and asked an Italian family for directions. I made a guess at the Italian: La tomba di Giulietta. Bravo, said the father, and in his slow answer, I caught: ottocentro metri.

So it was a fair walk but I got there. It was closed for the lunch hour though. I wondered if the characters had existed. In the end I concluded that Shakespeare must have embellished an older story and the city, glad to have another tourism attraction, designated a place for it. There's is even a house of Juliet with the famous balcony.

La Scala in Milan looks drab from the outside but of course people come for the performances.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the world's oldest shopping malls.

It's just next to the Piazza del Duomo and Milan Cathedral. It's second only to St. Peters Basilica in the Vatican in size for churches in the Italian peninsula.

The Last Supper is in Santa Maria delle Grazie, a minor convent. Being a mural, it can't be moved into a museum, of course. More on that later in Paris. They were restoring it (again) when I was there. It narrowly escaped Allied bomb damage during WWII.

There was an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches in the Sforza Castle which I viewed. The works were under dim light to protect them from light damage.

In the night I waited in Milan Central for an overnight train to Nice. It was not a long distance to go so the train left around midnight so as to arrive at dawn. So I missed all of Liguria, but I visited that region some 20 years later. I made sure to spend all my lire and was down to my last 100 lire coin. I asked at a kiosk if it could buy anything with it but the lady shook her head.

So it was arriverderci Italia, and bonjour France.