We have spent the last two weeks moving slowly across Italy on and off the Via Postumia. Our best days are always the ones Andrea Vitiello has carefully planned on either the cycling or walking Via Postumia . For reasons of time and availability of affordable accommodation, however, we are sometimes cutting corners and taking more direct routes. These straighter routes are more efficient, but rarely as beautiful and interesting as the official ones.  The Via Postumia undulates across Italy taking you through amazing historically important areas, villages and towns. We would miss many of them if we were planning our own routes. 

It is a compromise and we will continue to make some shortcuts so that we can hopefully make it to Arles this year. Hats off to Andrea for his care and thought in the planning of this route. It is truly exceptional. Not only for the places it passes, but for its insistence on keeping you safely off roads with traffic. Much of it follows soft or hard surfaced bike routes or small tracks and roads. 

It has given me a new perspective on how I might plan routes in the future.

Today we followed the undulating Postumia route along a bike path beside a river into Verona. It was delightful.

 We arrived in Verona early so we could spend the afternoon with our friend Kurt, who came down on the train from Austria to see us. We had a wonderful time catching up over pizza and drinks and then walked through the historic district.  Gord and I are nuts about Romanesque churches and the Cathedral and the Basilica of Saint Zeno were both amazing representatives of this era.

This morning Gord and I got up at five and walked through the old city before breakfast. It was lovely to have the streets to ourselves in the early light. 

Verona has UNESCO status for so many reasons but non of them are for a certain balcony created with old stones in the twentieth century. Regardless, Juliet’s balcony is still Verona’s number one tourist attraction.