Verona Arena Music Festival Amphitheatre Concerts and Area Events<< >> The opera Verona arena is world famous and of the many opera festivals held in Italy this has to be the best known and perhaps the most glamorous.
We had often talked about going to the opera here and four years ago we made a definite decision to go.
As you may know it is held over July and August with a selection of operas on offer.
We started looking to see which operas were to be performed months before we booked a hotel or flights. I could not believe my good fortune when one of the operas was ‘Cavalleira Rusticana’ which is one of my favourites. As always it was staged in conjunction with ‘Pagliacchi’ as they are both quite short, about an hour each. We decided to combine the Verona music festival with a stay around Lake Garda so we started to work out where would be the best place to stay. After looking at Garda and some of the other better-known towns around the Lake, we chose Desenzano, which is at the bottom end of the Lake. This is why we thought it would be the best place for us; it is on a main railway line so very easy to travel around; plenty of boats to visit around the Lake; not too ‘touristy’ and a good place to get a coach to and from the Verona amphitheatre. It is very expensive to stay in the city during the Festival but if you stay somewhere outside the Verona area, with convenient rail links, it is easy to go for the day and again for an evening at the opera, which is exactly what we did. We had a day visit to see the arena in daylight and also the balcony of Romeo and Juliet fame. I couldn’t quite understand how you could visit Juliet’s tomb (don’t they know she wasn’t real). The city is a lovely ‘walking about’ kind of place as most places in Italy are. Our reasoning was that it would be too tiring to spend the whole day and stay for the opera in the evening, besides I wanted to dress up a little.
I think the atmosphere is part of the experience so we chose to sit on the steps. My only small worry was that it would rain and as we driving to Verona on the evening it looked overcast but we were lucky. It was a lovely evening. We took a picnic of bread and cheeses and the nearest we could get to canolli along with wine which we had to put in a plastic bottle but it was fine. It was a wonderful place for a picnic. We rented some cushions, which we were very grateful for and we were all given candles to light before the performance began. Apparently this was from the time when that would have been the only source of light, very atmospheric. It was wonderful to sit on the ancient steps on a warm evening, sipping wine and listening to such gorgeous music. A little hint, the steps are worn smooth so choose your footwear carefully. We were pleased that we had been able to enjoy our wine with no thoughts of driving and only had to, grab a cup of coffee, make our way to the coach pick up point, then relax at the end of a memorable evening. Verona events as well as opera are staged throughout the year so it worth visiting the online information site.
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