OK.  Woke up early, normal morning, made my tea, looked at email, gazed out the windows, listened to the church bells and all of a sudden I hear LOUD hammering and close by too.  Ok, so I figure we’ll just wait a bit and it will stop, but it doesn’t.  In fact another hammer joins in.  We get ready quickly, thinking we’ll just go out and when we come back it will be done and then I notice it is right next door.  So, I knock on the door and these 2 very rough-looking shirtless guys, with their big bellies hanging out come to the door.  Of course they don’t speak English but I manage to get that they will be doing this for 3 or 4 more days!  And did I mention it was LOUD!  They are taking down walls with hammers in there.  I decided to call Licia, our lovely contact person from Verona Journeys and tell her.  I say, sounding borderline panicky, “Ci fanno pazzi”  “They’re making us crazy”.  Meanwhile she can hear the noise through the phone.  She says that the bigger apartment a few streets away is available and we can move.  Now.  So we scramble to pack up everything; she comes over and the three of us walk the four blocks to the new place with our suitcases, our bag of wet laundry and all the food from our kitchen.

So, now we are in the new apartment where we were going to spend the last night anyway; it’s much bigger (2 bed/2bath) and quirkier but no extra cost to us.  She (Licia) could not have handled it better! We get the food stashed and the laundry hung and go for a walk around our new neighborhood. Now we are just about a block and a half from Piazza Erbe but in a former palazzo converted to, of all things, condominiums.  There is a beautiful courtyard as you enter through an ancient door and a large iron gate.  (pictures tomorrow).  Anyway we are perfectly happy here.   The wi fi and the air work great.

Street shot near us:

We took the afternoon to visit the beautiful Duomo of Verona. It is built just beside the original pre-Christian church and there places you can go downstairs to see the excavations.  The main Duomo is filled with impressive art on the walls, ceilings, and floors, and flowers.

 I lit a candle for my family and it felt so good.

We stayed there for quite a while and even lingered outside the building in the back and the front trying to appreciate it.

Interesting–it was just the right amount of overwhelm that I could take it in.  You know, the Duomo in Firenze or Basilica San Marco in Venice, you can go 25 times before you are in tune with all of the parts, but this one, I felt like I got it in an afternoon.  It really helped that an organ player came in to practice and built up the drama for us.  Here she is near the light through the carved wooden gates to the altar.

Around the back, I saw this old wall with the shiny new motor bikes and the street is call Old Stone Street.

We went to Roy and Luisa’s for dinner, stopping first at the PAM store for a few last minute things.  It was Roy’s first time driving without Luisa and he was a bit high strung.  Luisa had invited her older cousin and her amazing Zio Guido who at 90 something still shops and cooks for himself every day.  The dinner was wonderful–the food and the company!

Around 11:00 we left there and we drove to a parking spot and walked to the Arena.  Mumford and Sons was playing to a soldout show, and there were lots of people, like us, sitting outside the arena just listening.  It ended around midnight and we said goodnight and walked home surrounded by the floods of young people leaving the concert, but our last few streets were dark and peaceful as were we.  Living the dream here.

Exhausted!