Vicenza

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Today we decided to go to Vicenza, a nice town an hour to the East of Verona. We had stayed there on our honeymoon because Verona was fully booked during opera season. We found parking and went to the park we remembered that had ducks for the girls to feed. I think there was a high school across the stream on lunch and apparently we were feeding the ducks on the running track they wanted to use for practice. After some hand gestures they got their point across and we moved and the class ran past. Once we had fed the ducks and thrown coins into the fountain, we entered the town gates and realized that due to poor timing on our part it was now the siesta and everything was closed. We made it to the tourist office which was still open and they pointed us to a good restaurant where we had an excellent lunch. I had this mushroom soup that was just to die for and Mark had boar proscuitto and the girls had pasta with parmesan–hey, they’re easy to please! After lunch we went to the main piazza where the market was just shutting down. This is where most of the Palladian buildings are located and somehow Mark and I missed this entire square when we stayed here before. Mark took pictures of the buildings whileCharlotte pushed Genevieve in the stroller. We found the hotel we stayed at on our honeymoon and wonder again how we managed to miss the piazza considering the hotel was right around the corner. We then toured the Teatro Olimpico design by Palladio, and got our gelato. By now the stores were open but the kids were done so we drove back to Verona. We were hoping to encounter a grocery store on the trip, but we wound up just going to the Esselunga instead. We were all tired and hungry and the kids pretty much lost it. Genevieve threw herself on the ground in the water aisle and Charlotte wouldn’t stop crying. Again, it was hard to come up with dinner plans considering we had no oven to cook in (so the premade lasagna, etc, was out). We settled on risotto and chicken nuggets (complete with toy dinosaur) and made our escape. Once back at the apartment it was dinner/bath/bed.