Verona — gateway to Veneto

The Palace of Reason with Dante is standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking very thoughtful. Pictures by Penny Skyrme

I visited many of the things in Verona on the must-do lists — art galleries, museums, the cathedral, other churches, monuments, Roman remains, high viewpoints, big department stores, small private shops and different kinds of restaurants.

But I have never seen a city with so many picturesque places that had so few attractive postcards. Even the art galleries and museums seemed to choose their most boring and unattractive exhibits to immortalise as postcards.

The biggest museum, in an old fortress which is worth seeing in its own right, had some very interesting and attractive exhibits (a statue of a knight on a beautifully-decorated horse, with a huge smile on his face; a picture from some centuries ago of a young man holding up a child’s stick figure picture; an ancient portrait that seemed to be straight out of the 1950s), but all it had as postcards were some bits of old marble and ruins and a rather uninteresting Rubens portrait.

The modern art gallery was also interesting, but the building was even more so. It was called the Palace of Reason, and Dante is standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking very thoughtful.

I went to several churches, big and small. You can buy a combined ticket for four of them, one of which was interesting because it was in a completely different part of the city, near the river and surrounded by houses and small shops, away from the hustle and bustle of the centre.

The styles were very varied, reflecting the long and diverse history. Some were very ornate and heavily gilded; one was beautifully decorated with flowers, leaves and trailing greenery all over the walls and ceiling, but unfortunately they didn’t know when to stop, and added stripy bricks and filled every available space, so it was quite overwhelming.

On an afternoon tour with a group from LinguaIt where I was studying Italian for two weeks, I went to an extraordinary church, Santa Maria in Organo, where a monk in the 15th century had spent many years creating the most beautiful decorations, mainly in wood. Apart from intricate carving, he covered several walls with pictures made from pieces of wood, painstakingly pieced together using the natural colours of different types of wood to create them.

I didn’t eat out very much (once I’d walked home from school, I didn’t feel like going back into town), but at one restaurant (with two companions, for moral support), I tried horsemeat for the first time. I wasn’t game to try horse tartare, as one of my classmates did (she liked it, but preferred horse schnitzel), but the stew I had was very nice, though not easily distinguishable from beef.

We also went to a home-made pasta restaurant, where the window was full of the different shapes on offer, and most of the sauces were made of seasonal vegetables and local ingredients.

At the apartment, I tried to immerse myself in the language by watching a lot of television. The first morning, I watched the news, which was an extremely boring programme. A man with a very uninteresting voice showed you the front page of all the national newspapers, reading out the headlines and underlining or circling them as he went. There are a lot of national newspapers in Italy. (I almost found myself missing Paul Henry).

Then I got rather a shock: a man in a military uniform (an officer in the Air Force, the caption said) appeared, looking very grim, obviously preparing to make a major announcement. Had there been a coup while I was asleep? No, of course not! It was just the weather forecast. Despite his high rank and his ballpoint pen (I’m not quite sure what it was for — was he really planning to scribble on the map?), he gave a very vague, general forecast for the whole country, and I had to switch to another channel to get the details for Verona.

Apart from the weather and the news (mainly the Pope, Hillary Clinton and a possible change to the Italian constitution), I often watched game shows. I was impressed by how pervasive the influence of the church still was these days, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that one competition involved contestants being given dates and having to identify the obscure religious feast days associated with them. No one seemed to find this odd, or indeed difficult! I can’t imagine it going down well on “Family Feud”.

The weather was glorious while I was there — the middle two weeks of September — apart from one day of rain. Unfortunately, this was the day I decided to go up the Lamberti Tower (345 steps) to see the view over the city. It was included in the entry ticket to the museum, and I’m not one to pass up something I’ve already paid for. I took some very grey, misty photographs through the wire-netting barriers, and came down again, not having seen very much at all.

Verona is in a very good position if you want to explore the Veneto region. There’s a direct line to Milan in one direction and Venice in the other, so day or weekend trips to either are very easy. There are also a lot of other interesting towns and cities nearby, such as Modena, Parma, Padua, Bologna and Vicenza, and Lake Como is also very close. I spent a day in Padua and an afternoon in Vicenza, and had time for a couple more short visits before the next stage of my holiday.