Looking for Juliet and two gentlemen

On our way home from the Florence/Rome field trip, the members of our little household stopped for a short stay in Verona.  Shakespeare's story of Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona.  In case you didn't know it, this is a fictional story.  It wasn't clear from the mass of people outside "Juliet's home" that this news has gotten around.  Equally disturbing was the apparent tradition of sticking used chewing gum on the stones around the entrance to Juliet's piazza.  Yuck.

Verona is interesting for other reasons.  Though it was heavily bombed during WWII, it's still a beautiful and historic city.  It has an intact Roman arena (still used for big concerts and an opera festival, and, unlike Rome's Colosseum, you can climb all over it), a reconstructed (because of bombing) Roman bridge, a Roman theater, a castle, some nice cathedrals, and lots of lovely streets and piazzas (and, of course, cafes). Verona was also the home of Dante, in his exile.

We happened upon a mother's day festival in Piazza Bra, which seemed to consist mostly of booths aimed at children's activities.  At the end of a stressful week of travel, I might have done this differently--maybe with a large corral of activities for kids and dads, and a large festival tent (way on the other side of the piazza) with music and margaritas for moms.  Oh well, I'm not in charge of everything.  In any case, we enjoyed a little of the festival, especially a traffic police booth with a small track for trikes and little cars in which kids were supposed to learn about stop signs and such.  We decided this would be a good activity for adults in Rome.  All in all, we found Verona to live up to its name as "Little Rome," and more.