in fair verona where we lay our scene

in verona just before christmas last year (2021). i’m sure the atmosphere is generally very different here, but on the 19th and 20th of december the city was enveloped in a cold freezing fog. the skies were leaden and there were only a very few hours of daylight.

in the heart of verona there was the inevitable christmas market, and surprisingly a huge number of tourists. the crowds were particularly dense around the so-called ‘juliet’s house’. a tourist attraction confected around the shakespeare tragedy of ‘starcros’t lovers’ in romeo and juliet.
away from the crowds the town had taken on shroud-like ghostly and mysterious appearance and the crowds rapidly thinned out to the occasional apparition in the mist.