Off the A4, 120 km west of Venice. You may see a menagerie of lions and camels, cart-loads of palmettos and cardboard sphinxes entering town – props for Aida, which they perform every summer at the Arena. The other open-air Roman theatre across the river does classical drama and Shakespeare before a more genteel audience. On the chalky gradine (stone benches) you read chiselled inscriptions: ‘Catullus sits here’; ‘This is Milo’s chair’. In Verona the Roman past is an everyday experience. The Arena is the third largest and most complete of Roman amphitheatres in Italy and it seats 22,000.

The city, coloured with its many buildings in soft red Verona marble, lies in a curve of the navigable Adige river, here a smooth-flowing, honey-coloured water. Long years of Austrian domination (they relinquished the Adige’s east bank only in 1866) and of Venice’s rule (note the Lion of St Mark on its pillar at the end of Piazza delle Erbe) have left their mark, but Verona’s chief tourist attraction is the bogus ‘Juliet’s balcony’. See it, but see also Ponte Scaligero, a dignified old bridge named for Verona’s ruling family over earlier centuries, and the Castelvecchio adjacent to it, the Scaliger seat of government. Count Ciano, son-in-law of Mussolini, was tried and executed here on the ex-Duce’s orders in 1944. The building is now a museum and art gallery with some fine Venetian and Veronese paintings and 14th-18thC sculpture.

Plazza delle Erbe, a general rendezvous with fruit and vegetable stalls and cafés under striped canopies, is at hand; so is the Lamberti tower, a viewpoint. Some distance away but worth the walk is San Zeno’s cathedral with exotically-decorated bronze doors.