Verona, Italia - and still too scared to use the lift

That's right - its day 7 and we're still too afraid to get the lift, and we're 5 floors up. Luckily there is plenty to distract us from the terrors of a sinister elevator. We went to the arena last night to watch Carmen - a French opera, set in Spain and performed in an italian ancient arena. It was incredible, especially considering how much the arena has seen since it was built. There were two orchestras, one at the front of the stage and one behind, that kept perfect time. We didn't, however, bank on it being so long that it needed 3 intervals. After an 8 hour train journey, a 4 hour opera proved to be a tad too long.

The photo above is by Robert Capa and shows a Sicilian local showing an American soldier which way the German army fled. We went to see his exhibition in the Scavi Scaligeri - a gallery set in underground ruins dating from Roman and Medieval Verona. Capa is fantastic. I never thought I'd find a foreign city I'd love as much as Paris, but Verona is all I could possibly want right now. Giuseppe Verdi once wrote "you may have the universe if i may have italy", never has a man been so right. From the room of our B&B we can hear a man who sings opera spontaneously through the day, waking up to your Italian neighbour singing opera is all you could want from a B&B I reckon. We've even seen a fair few monks and nuns (And a terrifying man dressed as a baby who screamed at us when we tried to run away from it). So far our money hasnt run out, so we're still eating 3 meals a day (even if one of them is free from the b&b and the other is a giant ice-cream). We move to Venice tomorrow and although we've done everything we wanted to do here and more, I'll be very sad to leave Verona. X