The daily diary of a wandering restaurateur
May 14 - Montagnana/Verona

After getting somewhat caught up on sleep, we ate a late breakfast at our little B&B and headed off for Verona. Our friend Marv Hunt was arriving at 7pm from Spokane by way of London and we were picking him up at the airport. Our hosts told us of an old medieval walled city (as opposed to a NEW medieval city?) that was more or less on the way to Verona and it sounded like it was worth a look. It was. We have seen a lot of old walls in our travels but usually there are just sections of the old fortifications left standing. This was one of the few where the entire wall was still intact. There were four main gates, all with drawbridges over the moat (which is now grassed in). They were mowing it today! It really reminds you how predatory life was in medieval times.

Verona is a relatively large city and a tourist destination, neither of which is much to our taste ... but we had time to kill before Marv's plane arrived so we had lunch in an open air café facing the arena and wandered around town. The coliseum in Rome was certainly larger than the one in Verona, but Rome's is a ruin and Verona's is still intact. It is still used for events -- mainly musical -- ranging from opera to rock. It would be a hoot to attend something here but our timing wasn't quite right.

We wandered the streets and ended up in the courtyard of the "Juliet house," allegedly the balcony made famous by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. The legitimacy of that claim is questionable, of course, but that hasn't stopped anyone. The courtyard itself is small and quite pleasant, but jammed with tourists and covered with graffiti. The scribblings are very small, however, rather than the large bold markings you associate with the sides of buildings. They seem to be of a romantic nature (Bill & Margene) rather than a personal grab for immortality. The overall effect is quite interesting since from a distance they just add an interesting dimension to the bricks. Some are up twenty feet on the wall. I have no idea how that was done.

We headed for the airport to get Marv and to see if Avis could give us a car that fit my feet a little better than the Alfa. When we stopped to fill the tank I learned that the car was diesel! Not that there's anything remarkable about that in itself, but until that time there was nothing in the sound or performance of the car that suggested it. That impressed me. Avis came through with an Opel Vectra -- also diesel -- that will work much better. Diesel fuel is .83 euros a liter while gasoline is 1.05, so everything helps. The dollar, by the way, is weak against the euro right now, so .83 is about one dollar US, making diesel fuel around $4.00 a gallon!

Somehow in the tiny Verona airport we managed to miss Marv as he came out of the customs area, but after 45 minutes of him waiting for us outside and us looking for him inside, we managed to connect and head back to Valbona for dinner. The original plan was to have dinner in the restaurant at the local castello which looked quite interesting, but it was $30 a head before wine and Margene was not all that hungry, so we opted for the castello's tavern instead. How they can support two restaurants in a town this size (where there are also a couple of other eating places) is a mystery. Perhaps the summer is much busier.

Several bottles of wine later (they had their own private label stock) we called it quits and headed for home. The local wine was about $8 a bottle and very drinkable. Tomorrow it is off to Venice.

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The restaurants del giorno


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