subject: Discovering Verona [print this page] First of all, you need to find a hotel, be it a 3 star hotel in Verona in the city centre or out of the centre: a hotel in San Michele Extra, a district of Veronas, where you can enjoy tranquillity without losing the advantages of the city. Once you found your hotel, you can start discovering Verona.
In Verona city centre everyone knows the Arena and Juliets balcony; sleeping in Verona, though, means having the chance to discover all the rest: UNESCO declared it a World heritage Site because of its urban structure and architecture, considered an example in name of its 2 thousand years of history. This allows the individuation of various styles witnessing the different historical periods that the city lived, wrapping different examples of architecture which let us see with our eyes the historical European periods of the last twenty centuries in a city which represents an excellent model of fortified city.
So, here we go: with a map o f Verona, youre ready to start. There are many offers, in many fields: historical, cultural, artistic, literary, the city offers everything to those who want to discover it. The compulsory stops will be the Arena, which hosts the famous Opera Festival in the summertime, whose queen in Aida, but also concerts of others genres, to satisfy everyones tastes; then, you cannot miss Juliets balcony, a fix destination for all those couples who, romantically, want to put their feelings at the same level as that of the young Romeo and Juliet, obviously not including their dramatic end.
Some may think that, after this, Verona has nothing else to show, but of course you just need to wander about the streets to see how many thing you still dont know; an interesting stop may be at the Biblioteca Capitolare, for example, in which the so called Indovinello Veronese (riddle from Verona), which goes:
Se pareba boves, alba pratlia arba
et albo versrio teneba, et negro smen seminaba
which means In front of him he led oxen, white fields he plowed, a white plow he hels a black seed he sowed. The solution? The writer, who leaves black seeds (the ink) with a white plow (the pen) led by oxen (the fingers) on a white field (the paper). The importance of this riddle is that its written in a language that could be identified an example of Italian: hence this document could be the very first witness of the birth of the Italian language, being it written between the end of the VIII and the beginnings of the IX century. The use of the conditional form is due, anyway, because critics are still studying it to decide if its ancient Italian or late Latin.
To have a general idea of the city, anyway, we can divide it into different poques, for each of which we can choose a monument, among the many existing, to represent it: the Roman times, with the Arena, already named, and Porta Borsari; the Medieval times, of which we remind the San Zeno Basilica, and the Scaliger times, with the Piazza dei Signori. Then, the Venetian times left us Porta Nuova, while the Franz Josef I Arsenal can represent the Austrian period.
