Today, we traveled to Verona as tourists, and then we traveled to Asiago to perform our final concert! It took about an hour to get to Verona from our hotel, and when we arrived, I was immediately enamored by the river views and stunning architecture. Verona sits on the River Adige, which as you can see in the photos below was running high and swift. I knew nothing about Verona beyond it being the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and while there is a tourist attraction featuring Juliet’s house and a balcony that was added after the work’s success, the UNESCO World Heritage Site has far more to offer to visitors.
On our hour-and-a-half guided walking tour, we learned more about the history of the city. Verona’s story told well is one of continual change. Verona switched hands multiple times between Austria and the Venetian Kingdom and was under siege multiple times by Florentine forces and even Napoleon. One of the city’s greatest military triumphs was driving out Napoleon’s occupying forces in 1797. After this, Verona switched between Austrian and Italian rule over the next few decades until finally becoming part of a united Italy in 1866. Shakespeare’s Juliet is not the only famous death on Verona’s streets. In a 1944 trial, under the fascist Italian Social Republic, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano was accused of plotting against the Republic and was executed on the banks of the River Adige. Throughout its troubled and varied military history, most of Verona’s important architecture thankfully endured, and walking through the city today feels like walking through a Time Machine.
After we departed from Verona, we headed back to the hotel to rest for a bit and prepare for our evening concert in Asiago. Asiago is also an hour away from our hotel, but getting there involved traveling up into stunning mountains that our travel manager called the “sub-Alps.” Once we arrived, the first thing I noticed was the temperature difference. Asiago was mercifully about 10 degrees cooler (Fahrenheit) than the lower elevations, and the views were amazing. We didn’t have time to explore Asiago, but after a catered dinner we arrived at the church for our sound check and concert. Our performance church, Duomo di San Matteo Apostolo, was extremely spacious inside and featured a stunning dome along with shrines and paintings. I should’ve taken more photos of the exterior, but we were running slightly behind and needed to get to the sound check so I only have interior photos. It was a deep performance space with reverb that traveled, and it was a great space to sing my solo in for the last time on the trip!
Tomorrow, we are heading to Venice for a final day of tourism! I can’t wait to spend time in such a famous city to close out the trip, and thank you for following my journey through the blog!