Verona

Yesterday we went to Verona. For those of you who are not familiar with this town, it is the setting of Romeo and Juliet. Pictured above is the "mythical" balcony of Juliet from which se called for Romeo. It was a very neat place to go, however there were about 19834098029 tourists there (like us) as well. To get to the balcony, you had to walk through a gateway full of love letters and then it opened into a courtyard. The walls of the gateway were filled with thousands of letters and people's names, it was really cool. I would have put a letter to Ben up, but I didn't have anything to stick a piece of paper on the wall except a dirty band-aid that was on my foot! haha...so I decided not to. There is a statue of Juliet in the courtyard where it is said to be good luck to touch her right breast. How this came about I will never know, but I did like the other tourists and went for it. I however tried to be classy and instead of a full on grope-fest I decided for a one finger poke, which can be seen in my pictures here: www.kelliebeth24.shutterfly.com
After molesting poor Juliet, we made our way to the Verona Amphitheater where we saw Rigoletto. It is an opera about a jester who is cursed for mocking this man because he begs the Duke to allow his dishonored daughter come back to the town. The jester (Rigoletto) has a daughter who is named Gilda. She falls in love with the Duke and eventually gets kidnapped by his courtiers. Rigoletto comes to get her and convince her that the Duke is not a good man. She does not believe her father but leaves with him. Rigoletto hires an assassin to kill the duke and makes Gilda come spy on the Duke so she can see for herself that he is a bad man. They catch the Duke with another woman and the assassin is called. Rigoletto wants the Duke's body delivered to him so he can throw it in the river. Gilda gets dressed in men's clothes as not to be detected and goes into the inn where the duke is staying. During a scuffle with the duke, assassin and mistress, she is mistaken for the Duke and is stabbed, put in a bag and delivered to her father. Rigoletto opens the bag to see the Duke's face and is horrified by what he finds. From there it was pretty much over. It was a very sad tragedy but very beautiful. I am so glad that my first real opera was seen in an Italian amphitheater. It was magical. I am pretty sure I was one of the only students who enjoyed the opera, but oh well, it was great. After the opera was over, we all piled back into our charter buses and began the 3.5 hour trek back to Florence.
Today was very lazy and nice. After waking around 1pm (we got home at around 430am) we decided to go to the pool. It took us almost an hour to walk there and when we finally did get there around 415pm we were definitely ready for a dip in the pool. We went inside only to find that it was 8 euro ($12) so we quickly said "no grazie" and went on our way. We decided that next week we will get up early to go, where paying that much money would actually be worth it (I guess?) The rest of my day was spent at the supermarket getting treated badly by the deli counter lady (she made it perfectly clear that she did NOT like Americans...) and standing in line.
Until next time, ciao!
~K