Verona: Our Wonderful Day In Verona

We wrote our experiences of Verona separately (for no particular reason)… so today, you get to experience Verona through both of our eyes in one short post!

Verona: Jonathan’s experience
To be honest, before going, I wasn’t that excited about going to Verona. I knew it was a fabled city because of the story of Romeo and Juliet, but didn’t know that Shakespeare’s story actually came from such a cool city. There are a number of things to see and do in Verona, but let’s get to the topic everyone would want to know about…
Did we see where Romeo met, courted, and eventually died with Juliet?
Well…
Here’s the balcony of Juliet

The balcony of Juliet as it stands today is actually believed to be three sides of an ancient sarcophagus (read – built for a dead person), and the house of Juliet was actually the house of the family Capulletto (or something like that), so it’s unclear if Shakespeare was inspired to write his story because there was actually a “Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet” or, if he created Romeo and Juliet after hearing about or seeing the house of Capulletto. Anyway, maybe I’m too practical in wanting the story to be true before buying into the whole story and getting really excited about seeing the lives and times of the lovers, but in my estimation, it was a bit of an overrated attraction. It was fun to go and see nonetheless.
We didn’t see the tomb of Juliet (again, due to the fact that we don’t know if the story is true, and so there are more interesting things to see).
So what was so cool about Verona? Nothing in particular, AND everything about it really… It’s actually a city where people live, and have lives that aren’t solely based around tourists coming to the city (which was how we felt in Venice – which is still a nice city though), and has some really great attractions… including the arena (www.arena.it), which is like a smaller version of the Coliseum, but what’s really cool is that in summertime, it’s still actively used for plays and shows.

How cool would it be to sit in an arena that was used in Roman times and actually see a show today, over 1,500 years later? (Personally, I think it would be cool to see a lion battling a person, like they used to do in Roman times, but maybe I only think that would be cool, and then once I saw it, I would think otherwise: probably a bit violent and gory to watch a lion mauling a person or vice-versa).
Verona is a city which has a beautiful compilation of churches and beautiful sights. There are three major castles, some very nice bridges, and neat little caf

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