Having departed Tuscany for the last time (in 2016, I always qualify), we headed east into the Vento. The first stop was a city in the west of that region, Verona.

It's a city that we were all quite smitten with and regretted greatly that we had so little time here. It was essentially a whistlestop of only a couple of hours that it is a city that you could spend a few days in without regretting it.

The city is built alongside the Adige River, the second longest in Italy, which flows from the Alps near the border with Austria and Switzerland, through Northeast Italy and out to the Adriatic. Needless to say, this is it here.

The bridge that you can see is the Ponte Pietra, which literally translates as the "stone bridge". Unfortunately occasionally we Romans were a bit too literal and not quite poetic enough when we named things.

Unfortunately this is not in fact our original bridge. Most of that was destroyed by the German army in 1945 when they retreated north though the bridge was rebuilt in 1957 using the original materials as far as was possible. The building provided the citizens with access to the Roman theatre on the east bank of the river. (Not to be confused with the arena which will feature a number of shots in this gallery.) I estimate that theatre to be off to my right somewhere judging from the relative position of the bridge, and the sanctuary (Santuario Madonna di Lourdes), the prominent building on the hill. Unfortunately we didn't get to see it. (I mean the theatre, not the sanctuary. Although I believe that the views from the sanctuary are quite impressive as well. Just chalk that up as yet another thing that we missed out on in Verona which gives a high likelihood of having this on our list of places to return to.)