Verona was a great choice for my home base for the next 5 nights. Despite all the touristy Romeo and Juliet schlock, it’s a charming little place. Even with all the hokey tourist groups chasing after kitsch from a fictional story written 400 years ago by an Englishman that probably never set foot in the city, it had a vibrant local scene. I think it was a good move to get here a week earlier than I had originally intended to avoid the huge opera festival that is held in the city’s 2000 year Roman arena, as well (made it a lot easier to get into the restaurants I wanted to without having to fight with all the opera geeks flooding the city and packing the 25,000-seat stadium).
From Verona, I took a few day trips to the surrounding area. One day I went to Padua (Padova for the locals) to check things out there. Being a Sunday and given the fact that Padova is a bit off the main tourist trail, the city was almost completely dead. It was a little eerie. You hardly got a whiff, even of the 60,000 students from the local university that are typically overrunning the place. The real issue, though, was that I realized only after heading there that the famous market in Padova isn’t open on Sunday. I still got the see the big sights (Scrovengi Chapel and the Basilica of St. Anthony, but no market. All the restaurants I wanted to go to were also closed! I decided to save that for another day and get to Vicenza to check out the snazzy architecture there before heading back to Verona for the evening.
I was pretty jazzed about seeing the market in Padova, so I headed back the next day. It ended up being a good move, as I was able to make a friend on the train ride there, too. I spent a couple hours checking out the market and chowing down of some of the local produce. There was lots of pretty interesting stuff, but the big winner there was all the horse meat, a regional specialty. Butcher shops has huge chunks of horse steak, massive equine ribs, and lots of this stuff called sfilaccii, a finely shredded, smoke, dried horse meat that you can toss in little salads.
Not feeling like chomping down on uncooked horsemeat at the market, I caught up with my friend for lunch, had an amazing pair of octopus with some kind of tomato and balsamic vinegar sauce and grilled polenta, and also some of the local bigoli noodles with a tomato-based duck sauce. After that, I got a little local tour of the town. The highlight was watching one of that day’s doctoral graduates from the university be humiliated in the fashion traditional to the University of Padova. She had to dress up in a goofy cardboard box costume and read a large poster with her “biography” on it while doing shots and while her friends dumped handfuls of flour and ice water down the neck of her costume. Apparently it is typical for the poster biography to have lurid details regarding past sexual escapades and other private matters in it. All of this is done in front of the graduate’s entire family, who were there for the more formal parts of the graduation process. My friend, also a graduate student at the university, said she had mixed feelings about her impending graduation date.
On the third day in town, I caught the train up to Bolzano. Being a former part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it feels a lot more Germanic than Italian. For lunch there, I chowed down on a massive, slow-roasted skin-on pork shank with sauerkraut and the local speck-infused dumplings. Go figure that on my trip to Italy so far the single best thing I’ve eaten was essentially German food (although the octopus from Padova was a very close second).
While in the area, I was also able to take a wine-tasting trip to the nearby Valpolicella wine region. Given the fact that many of the winemaking techniques in this area are very unique, if was both informative and tasty (for those not in the know, they actually lay the harvested grapes out to dry for a few months and raisinate them a bit before pressing to make the local amarone and reccioto wines). We also got to see quite a bit of the countryside.
From Verona, I took a few day trips to the surrounding area. One day I went to Padua (Padova for the locals) to check things out there. Being a Sunday and given the fact that Padova is a bit off the main tourist trail, the city was almost completely dead. It was a little eerie. You hardly got a whiff, even of the 60,000 students from the local university that are typically overrunning the place. The real issue, though, was that I realized only after heading there that the famous market in Padova isn’t open on Sunday. I still got the see the big sights (Scrovengi Chapel and the Basilica of St. Anthony, but no market. All the restaurants I wanted to go to were also closed! I decided to save that for another day and get to Vicenza to check out the snazzy architecture there before heading back to Verona for the evening.
I was pretty jazzed about seeing the market in Padova, so I headed back the next day. It ended up being a good move, as I was able to make a friend on the train ride there, too. I spent a couple hours checking out the market and chowing down of some of the local produce. There was lots of pretty interesting stuff, but the big winner there was all the horse meat, a regional specialty. Butcher shops has huge chunks of horse steak, massive equine ribs, and lots of this stuff called sfilaccii, a finely shredded, smoke, dried horse meat that you can toss in little salads.
Not feeling like chomping down on uncooked horsemeat at the market, I caught up with my friend for lunch, had an amazing pair of octopus with some kind of tomato and balsamic vinegar sauce and grilled polenta, and also some of the local bigoli noodles with a tomato-based duck sauce. After that, I got a little local tour of the town. The highlight was watching one of that day’s doctoral graduates from the university be humiliated in the fashion traditional to the University of Padova. She had to dress up in a goofy cardboard box costume and read a large poster with her “biography” on it while doing shots and while her friends dumped handfuls of flour and ice water down the neck of her costume. Apparently it is typical for the poster biography to have lurid details regarding past sexual escapades and other private matters in it. All of this is done in front of the graduate’s entire family, who were there for the more formal parts of the graduation process. My friend, also a graduate student at the university, said she had mixed feelings about her impending graduation date.
On the third day in town, I caught the train up to Bolzano. Being a former part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it feels a lot more Germanic than Italian. For lunch there, I chowed down on a massive, slow-roasted skin-on pork shank with sauerkraut and the local speck-infused dumplings. Go figure that on my trip to Italy so far the single best thing I’ve eaten was essentially German food (although the octopus from Padova was a very close second).
While in the area, I was also able to take a wine-tasting trip to the nearby Valpolicella wine region. Given the fact that many of the winemaking techniques in this area are very unique, if was both informative and tasty (for those not in the know, they actually lay the harvested grapes out to dry for a few months and raisinate them a bit before pressing to make the local amarone and reccioto wines). We also got to see quite a bit of the countryside.
