Verona

The stone tiers have no backs, and a hired cushion is what makes them bearable. The summer opera runs without microphones, so the sound comes back off the stone. The audience still lights candles before it begins. The scenery stands out in the square by day.

The balcony came off another building and was fixed here in the twentieth century, so it never belonged to the house. The courtyard walls were once solid graffiti; notes now go only where the city allows. On the bronze one breast is rubbed to another colour.

The market stands on the Roman forum, so the same ground has traded for two thousand years. The winged lion on the column at one end is what Venetian rule left behind, and the stalls have tipped a long way toward souvenirs.

The bridge was blown up in 1945; its bricks were dredged off the riverbed and stacked back where they had stood. The museum inside leaves its concrete and steel mountings bare, which draws architecture students. The bridge is always open to cross.

The doors carry dozens of bronze panels with biblical scenes and local legend side by side. Shakespeare put the marriage in the crypt of this church, and the crypt really is as wide as the nave. Mantegna's altarpiece still hangs in its original spot.

It stands beside Piazza delle Erbe and is climbed either by stairs or by lift. From the top the red roofs and the arena fall into one view, and the bells still ring, so arriving just before the hour hurts. The stair comes to 368 steps.

Gothic sarcophagi sit raised in the air inside an iron fence at the edge of the street. They hold the family that ruled the city, and setting them on a street corner instead of inside a church is the odd part, though most of it shows from outside.

Cypresses stand in straight ranks in the lower garden, with stairs climbing the hill behind them. A face is carved into the rock halfway up, arranged so that you look out through its mouth. There is a maze, and it catches more people than you would think.

A Roman theatre cut as a half-circle into the slope across the river, and older than the arena. Shakespeare is staged here in summer with the river and the city showing behind the stage, and the monastery building above holds the archaeological museum.

The hills northwest of Verona, where narrow roads split away between the vineyards. Some farms open the lofts where grapes dry for more than three months, and a call ahead gets you into the room. Buses are rare, so it works far better with a car.

A quiet square right beside Piazza delle Erbe, with Dante in the middle, fitting for the city that sheltered him in exile. A whale rib hangs under the arch joining the two squares; it is said it will fall when someone who has never told a lie walks through.

A Roman bridge blown up by retreating German troops in 1945, then rebuilt from its own stones fished out of the river. Cross, then climb the steps or ride the funicular up San Pietro hill; the old-quarter rooftops inside the river's loop spread out below.

Romanesque below with Gothic on top, and Titian's Assumption in the first chapel on the left as you enter. The same ticket opens the baptistery next door, whose octagonal font was cut out of one piece of stone. Set back from the busy squares, it stays quiet.

Verona's largest Gothic church, where Pisanello's fresco of St George and the Princess survives above the arch of a chapel on the right. At the foot of two columns near the entrance, stone hunchbacks carry the holy water basins on their backs.

A town on a long peninsula reaching into the south of Lake Garda, entered through the moated castle of the Scaliger family. At the very tip, Roman villa ruins called the Grottoes of Catullus overlook the lake. From Verona it is a bus ride, or train then bus.