We had a birthday to get to. Gardaland was booked for the 7th — James’s birthday, the theme park tradition running unbroken — and Verona was the two days in between Sirmione and the rollercoasters. A stopover, in theory. Somewhere to be before somewhere else.
Verona had other ideas.
The southern walls. Two thousand years old and still doing their job.
We arrived on the evening of the 5th of May. Strava logged it as Verona First Evening. Walk from Station to Guest House — 1.33 miles, 31 minutes. That slight confusion between clock and gut is one of the pleasures of train travel. You step off the platform, you start walking, and the city introduces itself before you’ve had time to form an opinion.
It was warm. Properly warm — the kind of warmth that feels like a reward after a grey English spring. The route from the station cuts through the city walls — not some ceremonial arch but a working gate in a working wall, the kind of structure you’d pull a double-take at in most countries and barely notice here because something equally extraordinary is waiting around the next corner.
The guesthouse was down one of those Verona side streets that keep going when you expect them to stop. Narrow, quiet, apparently unremarkable in the daytime. We didn’t know yet that was just the daytime version. We’d find out later.
The 5th. Afternoon.
After dropping bags we headed straight back out. Verona Afternoon One — 1.78 miles, 45 minutes, starting at 5:26pm — and somewhere along the way Strava quietly informed us we’d completed the May Walk 50K challenge. A nice footnote to a day that hadn’t really started yet.
We crossed the Adige for the first time. The river was already high, the colour of strong tea, running fast with the weight of the mountains behind it.
The Adige from the bridge. Already running high. It would get higher.
Standing on the bridge looking west toward Castel San Pietro rising above the city on its wooded hill — cypress trees black against a building sky — it was one of those views that makes you understand, immediately, why people have been choosing to live here for two thousand years.
By the following morning the Adige meant business.
The 6th. The big day.
The morning walk was the one. Verona Sights. Very busy — 4.92 miles, just under two hours, 8,474 steps. The Strava title is doing some work there.
We started early, which was the right call. The Roman walls on the southern edge of the city are best walked before the heat builds — a long, almost hypnotic perspective of layered stone and Roman engineering, buttressed at intervals, running toward a gate tower in the middle distance. We found memorials tucked into the green margins. A Bersaglieri stone, a feathered hat cast in bronze. A monument to the fallen tank crews — Ai Caduti Carristi — with a wreath of plastic sunflowers somebody had placed recently enough that it was still bright.
Portoni della Brà. The city has been coming and going through this gate since the 14th century.
The Arena. There’s no preparing for it. You come through a gate and suddenly there it is in the middle of the city, two thousand years old, and the city has simply organised itself around it.
Arena di Verona. Built around 30AD. Still selling tickets.
We paid to go inside. You walk through a vaulted tunnel — dark stone arching overhead, a worker in yellow hi-vis visible through the far arch framing the stage below — and then you’re in.
Through the tunnel. Two thousand years of this same view.”]
The seating banks up in all directions. A stage was being assembled on the floor. A school party from what sounded like every region of Italy simultaneously were installed on the upper tiers, being taught something with considerable theatrical commitment. We sat for a long time. There was nowhere we needed to be.
A school trip, an opera stage being built, and us. The Arena accommodates everything.
The Juliet situation.
Go early or go late. We cannot stress this enough.
Casa di Giulietta is genuinely lovely — the courtyard, the balcony, the bronze statue worn gold on one side from decades of hands — but by mid-morning it is approximately the busiest courtyard in Europe.
The balcony. Best seen before the crowds arrive.
Twenty minutes later.
The graffiti wall in the entrance tunnel is a sight in itself: every surface covered in declarations in every language, decades of hearts and initials, a sign explaining in three languages that writing on the walls carries a fine of €3,000 — surrounded entirely by writing on the walls.
Prohibited. Heavily.
We added nothing. This particular love story doesn’t need our initials on it.
The afternoon.
The afternoon brought a shorter circuit — 1.45 miles — the Arena exterior properly, a Roman soldier in full costume standing in one of the archways collecting tips with considerable dignity, and eventually Piazza delle Erbe in full swing.
He was there every day. Completely committed to the bit.
We found ourselves in a loggia where a neon sign read BEAUTY IS A READY-MADE in orange capitals over a classical statue. Verona does this — slides the contemporary in against the ancient without apology, and somehow makes both look better for it.
Museo Maffeiano. Verona doesn’t need to try this hard. It tries anyway.
We wandered. The Arco dei Gavi. The Ponte Scaligero. The Palazzo della Ragione with its extraordinary external staircase climbing the striped brick facade. Hidden courtyards appearing between restaurants. A tiny chapel converted into a ristorante, its baroque doorway still intact, a chalkboard menu where the altar might have been.
Arco dei Gavi. 1st century Roman triumphal arch. Moved here in 1932 when the road needed widening.
The Adige by afternoon. The Ponte Scaligero has seen worse.
The evening.
Strava recorded it as Verona, food, cocktails and Champions League with the Inter fans — 1.17 miles, 22 minutes moving time, average heart rate 107 bpm. The heart rate is not from the walking.
We found a restaurant. We had no plan. We ate well — Verona is wine country, Soave and Valpolicella practically on the doorstep — and then the Champions League came on and the place transformed. Inter were playing. We didn’t ask to be seated among football fans. We just happened to be there when it happened.
The passion was extraordinary — not hostile, not loud in an ugly way, but fully, joyfully committed, the way Italian football has always been committed, the way it makes English football look like a polite suggestion. The restaurant kept bringing things. More wine. Small things to eat. People were standing in the doorway from the street to watch the screen inside.
It was one of those evenings you don’t plan, can’t plan, and that become the thing you talk about afterwards when someone asks about the trip.
We walked back through those narrow streets at night. The same streets that had been quiet when we’d arrived were entirely different — tables outside, people, music from somewhere, the whole neighbourhood turned on like a lamp.
Tomorrow was James’s birthday. Gardaland was waiting. But tonight — tonight was a pretty hard act to follow.
Total: 10.65 miles · 20,288 steps · 3h 34m · 184ft elevation · 5–6 May 2025