Left the hotel in Venice around 9.15am, and were greeted at AVIS by a Opel Mevida. Not the Golf we were expecting, but better than nothing. Left Venice across the bridge and headed towards Verona. Well, I guess 'towards' is a misnomer. We chose to avoid the toll-ways and the GPS took us around the long way. Added about an hour to the trip. Found out that round-abouts in Italy suck and make little to no sense.
Decided to have lunch just outside Verona. Had pizza and a giant Coke. I love the Cokes here, they're huge...
After lunch we headed to the old part of Verona. Very nice. All we knew about before hand was that Juliet's Balcony was here...and by Juliet's balcony I mean some balcony they decided to call Juliet's balcony to get people there. Had a look, but the rest of Verona was better. There's a plaza area with a little market and some nice building, and then the old Roman Arena. It's now used as a theatre so has staging and metal eating, but still was pretty cool, and gave a good view of the city. After leaving this section we decided to try go up the hill to get a view of the whole city. This didn't quite go as planned and ended up at the top of the wrong hill with a view of the surrounding country-side. Still kind of cool, but on the way back down the hill got a couple of decent views of the city. We decided to leave Verona and head towards Milan, with the intention of carrying on to Como and staying there for the night.
As it was starting to get towards afternoon, and the drive to Como would take nearly 5 hours on side roads, we entered the toll-way. Driving along this motorway, we started finding out about some of the towns we were driving past, as some looked quite interesting. While doing this, we read up about Bergamo, a city we were going to be driving by soon. On reading about it, we decided to take a detour here and spend the night. I'm glad we did.
Bergamo is split into two sections, the older, Upper Town (cittá alta) and the Lower Town (cittá bassa). On our first day here we managed to walk around a bit of the Lower Town. The lonely Planet book hinted that the Upper Town was far more interesting and that the Lower Town had little going for it. If this is true, then i can't wait to see the Upper Town tomorrow. The Lower Town has some great building sand streets with some cool shops too. It's a bit of a mix between old, new and pseudo-old. Took a bunch of photos, and bought a couple of t-shirts. Really glad we decided to stop here, as it's a bit out of the way and a bit more "local". This does have it downside, as ordering dinner at the restaurant was a bit difficult as it was all in Italian, and I had to ask the waitress three times what meat was in a certain dish. Turned out to be beef in balsamic vinegar. Pretty nice actually.
Tomorrow we're going to drive up to the Upper Town and look around there in the morning, and then the plan is to head to Lake Como for the afternoon. Should be fun.
Signing off...
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