No plans in the morning.  We just walked in the area kind of behind the arena.  It’s really difficult to have a sense of direction here because the streets are all curving all the time.  Most of where we walked seemed residential.  We ran across this super interesting building which really could use some restoration.  It seemed as if there were offices in it or maybe apartments, but the figures outside need help:

Next stop, Cafe Coloniale for coffee.

And walking through a part of the Christmas market focusing on food.  It was still before lunch time and the only place with any action was the pretzel stand, maybe because they had a real fire for cooking the pretzels???

Christmas commercialism up against historic architecture

Christmas decorations are going up all over town.  I’m afraid I won’t see the bulk of them because we leave Dec. 1st and people say they won’t be lit up until December. Vedremo (we’ll see)  We walked back towards home and saw this bakery window.  Just as we were looking at it an entire class of young kids came in.  How were they ever going to deal with those kids?

At the real Bottega della Gina, we stopped and bought some assorted tortellini.  I didn’t have a good feeling about the place and neither did Ken, but the tortellini looked good and all the different kinds (they probably have at least 10 different varieties) hooked me.  We cooked them for dinner and none of them were anything special.  As we intuited, the place is a gimmick, not serious food.

We both agreed, this was our eating low point of the trip.  Now where to go but up!

Virginia was our exchange student last fall.  We were so excited and happy to see her again.  We met her bus (she lives out of the center) at Pizza Bra and sat there for a while. She called her dad and we arranged to meet at Cafe’ Coloniale.

Ken is happy!

We had the pleasure of sitting in the cafe (Ken and I each had a spritz) with Virginia and getting caught up with her.  After a while Paolo came and we had a nice visit with him.  He offed to take us around on Friday on an historic tour of the walls of Verona.

Finally we walked Virginia back to Piazza Bra and came home to cook our lousy tortellini.  We also had a cheap (and it tasted cheap) bottle of wine and I cooked some veggies.

Food-wise a low, but friend wise a big plus!

BTW–We finished The Crown and have started the new Netflix series Paranoid.