Horses for 2nd courses

From Cinque Terre we went to Parma because I figured they would have some good prosciutto. We parked the car and walked around what turned out to be a complete ghost town. It turned out that most business owners who can afford it go to the coast for most of August or sometimes until early Sept (one closed shop front had a "gone tanning" sign). Anyway eventually we found a street that had some open restaurants and Heidi got some proscuitto with rockmelon and I had some with parmesan.

After leaving the ghost town, on the way to Verona we passed a tomato truck with no cover with the tomatoes piled high and thought it was a bit ridiculous until we caught up to another 3 tomato trucks all in a line. We have noticed that the Europeans seem to enjoy nothing more than perpetuating stereotypes.

We arrived in Verona and went for a walk to the Arena which was built in the first century and had a drink at Piazza Bra because it was hot as. Before dinner we went via Juliet's house, this was packed out, full of tourists. Apparently it's not really Juliet's house but they wanted somewhere to put tourists or something.

"please don't deface the walls at Juliet's house"

"OK"

We walked around looking for a few places that good old trip advisor had recommended marked on our dumb tourist map and eventually settled on one of the two we passed that made you have 2 courses for 16 of the euros, no exceptions, you must have your 2 courses you fatty. The other restaurant that was recommended which let you decide if you only wanted 1, 2 or 3 courses was still on holidays because that's just what happens apparently.

Heidi tried to order the lightest meals on the menu, a bean soup, which wasn't light at all and ham and melon for a change. (Heidi also had melon for breakfast taking this to the 3rd melon dish of the day). I had duck ragu with parpadelle pasta and a pastissada de caval which is a pulled horse meat stew with polenta and was yum.

Afterwards we went to a wine bar called Botiga Vini. As I was enjoying a nice glass of Chianti, I noticed (in addition to a photo of Bill Clinton and Hildog at that very bar) one of the other Italian men at the bar spritzing his red wine with Sanpellingro. I was completely up for the horse meat but there's some regional things that I am just refusing to try.

The next day we went to try to see Castel San Pietro, this was an attempt in futility as we just found the camp site which is somewhere nearby but not where we could see, as it was quite a hilly area and getting pretty stinking hot we cut our losses and found a gelati shop which was a much more pleasant experience. We then went for a walk over the Ponte Pietra which I think was built in 1 B.C. or something. There's another bridge called Ponte Nuovo just south of it, nuovo I think means new so it is probably built in like 300 A.D.

This bridge was slightly older than Dave Broughton.

We had booked tickets earlier for the Opera which was on that night but went back to Botiga Vini for a meal as we didn't have time or appetite enough for another mandatory 2 courses. I had suckling pig shoulder and Heidi had beef carpachio with Venetian sauce. Not sure what Venitian sauce was but it tasted like aoili.

We went down to the Arena for our second Opera of the trip which was Turandot. We had the cheap "stone seats" and realising this packed a towel to sit on which was lucky because they were not only hard as stone but a half tonne of stone which has been sitting in the sun all day keeps its arse scalding temperatures well into the night. There were people renting cushions for 10 of the euros and there were signs not to throw them down into the people in the nice seats after the performance. I guess anything else you could throw was free game.

Heidi on the stone steps of the arena

The opera was pretty cool, it was a massive cast and I was glad we read the synopsis before going in as it was in Italian and we would have had no idea what was going on otherwise. I enjoyed it but realised after I knew the score because Pavorotti used to sing part of it. The orchestra was great, they had like 5 harps so you could tell they were good. The opera we saw Kirsty play in couldn't even afford so many harps.

Turandot at Verona Arena

Turandot cast