Verona

Today’s lesson in the ways of Italy was frustrating but ultimately useful to learn: never go somewhere on an Italian public holiday, especially not when it’s also a delightful sunny spring day.

I’d decided to take the Frecciarossa out to Verona, a gloriously ancient city to the east of Milan, just a comparative stone’s throw from Venice. Based on the architectural evidence still on display, the idea of bricklaying was still a fresh one – many walls look less like orderly rows of bricks than extremely disciplined piles of rocks.

 

However, it took some doing to even see these piles of rocks, as it’s Easter Monday, a holiday that the Italians take more seriously than Good Friday or Easter Sunday, and every white trash eurobogan for 100 miles had converged on Verona for a day trip. Every tourist attraction – the arena, the Casa di Giulietta, the Torre dei Lamberti – had ridiculously lengthy lines waiting to get in. The Casa di Giulietta had an especially long queue that snaked across the courtyard, around the corner and a full block down the next street. Apparently Juliet, being a hot, mentally fragile young girl who arguably doesn't really exist, has become the patron saint of white girl social media influencers… which I guess sort of makes sense. Inside the house there’s a bronze statue of her, patina’d with age except for the breasts, which one is supposed to rub for “good luck in love”, which seems to me to be taking the wrong lesson from the story of Romeo and Juliet. I prefer to think of it as a little something for the boyfriends who have to accompany their girlfriends through the interminable queue and the photo ops beyond because it’s, like, soooo romantic. You’d kill yourself too if I killed myself, right babes?

Because I have no tolerance for mentally fragile women, regardless of how hot they are and whether or not they actually exist, I skipped that attraction and made do with my usual aimless, gelato-fuelled wandering. It was remarkable that away from the tourist spots, the city was perfectly calm and quiet. At some points I was strolling down a deserted street, and could see glimpses of the heaving throngs a hundred metres away, being very much someone else’s problem. I even had space to do my own white girl Instagram spin in the Piazza del Signori, under the stern gaze of the statue of Dante Alighieri, whose own romantic travails were too obscure for the Casa di Giulietta set.

With every major attraction too full of ridiculous eurotrash, I took the literal high road and ran away to the Castel San Pietro, the highest point in Verona, and sat on the terrace of a high-end restaurant with an aperol spritz, looking down on the hoi polloi and judging the hell out of them. Mind you, the terrace attracted cashed up members of the hoi polloi too – puffa-jacketed teens eating overpriced hamburgers, middle-aged bottle blondes blowing cigarette smoke all over everyone else, and a hilarious 30-something overweight chav who had been sunburnt to a vivid beetroot shade yet insisted on sitting in the full sun for hours, drinking as if his liver had wronged him somehow. Amid these awful people, the staff were rushed off their feet but remained consummate professionals, as waiters tend to do in Italy, accommodating every need, switching between a half dozen languages at the drop of a hat, and making sure that the venue raked in untold thousands of euros across the course of the afternoon.

 

I strolled back to the train station a little after 4pm, and asked the ticket agent for a ticket for the 5pm Frecciarossa back to Milan. She looked at her screen, raised an eyebrow in surprise, and said no – every seat in both 1^st and 2^nd class was already purchased. And not just for the 5pm, but for all the Frecciarossas for the rest of the day.

With just a touch of panic, I asked her what my options were. She worked out that I could take the regional train, which would take two and a half hours rather than an hour. Then she did some extra tapping on her keyboard and realised that as long as I changed seats in Brescia, as existing passengers got on and got off, I could actually stay on the same Frecciarossa the whole way to Milan… but it would have to be charged as two separate tickets, which would double the price. I sighed and went with that option. So my trip to Verona was 27 euros, and my trip from Verona was 52 euros.

At least when I was safely back in Milan I could walk through the comparatively empty streets and attend to my habitual aperitivo, this time at an Asian fusion place with edamame and dumplings as bar snacks and a spectacular coffee negroni that made me fall back in love with this wonderful but occasionally exasperating country.