Of all the incredible places we were able to visit in Italy, one of the most unexpectedly cool things we did was in Verona. I hadn’t even included Verona on my agenda for Italy when we were planning the trip but it was only a short train ride from Brescia where we were staying at the time so we figured we’d check it out. I’m a sucker for love stories in every shape and form, and Verona just happened to be home to the inspiration for one of the most famous love stories of all time – Romeo and Juliet. So after walking down the marble paved streets on the main drag of the city and admiring all the beautiful apartments above the stores, we came to the house and courtyard which housed the balcony from one of the most famous acts between the star crossed lovers – the balcony scene. How much of this love story is true, we don’t know, but supposedly this house really did belong to a 14th century Veronese family which inspired Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet in 1594. And then thankfully for the rest of us, inspired the movie Romeo and Juliet several hundred years later which at that point was so different than any other movie I’d seen and I still own the soundtrack.
But the thing I found so incredible about this was after entering the gates to the to the courtyard, the walls were lined with thousands of love letters and notes from those who had been there and wanted to leave a message for friends, family or their loved ones. Of course, Vanessa and I were kind of obsessed with it and wrote a note to all of our friends in Austin (because as cool as it was, writing a love note would still be kind of creepy to me). Side note: apparently, Shakespeare’s house in London evokes these same emotions and I’d love to see it one day and read through the guestbook which includes so many famous writers inspired by W.S. I hope the note stayed because we had to chew gum and use that to stick it up there. I mean, who carries tape to Verona?
