Verona is where the north of Italy starts to feel like the south, and where history piles up in layers so thick that you trip over them. The Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, still dominates Piazza Bra and still hosts opera in summer, with tens of thousands of people sitting on stone steps two thousand years old. The Adige river swings through town in a double bend, crossed by bridges including the Ponte Pietra, part Roman and rebuilt after the Germans blew it up in 1945. And of course there is Juliet's balcony, which was added to a medieval house in the twentieth century to satisfy visitors searching for the Shakespeare story; people queue to rub the breast of her bronze statue for luck.
The city's real heyday came under the della Scala family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whose fortress of Castelvecchio, with its red-brick bridge over the Adige, now houses an excellent art museum. Their extraordinary Gothic tombs stand in a little courtyard near Piazza dei Signori. UNESCO listed the whole city in 2000.
Riding into Verona is not a joy. The centre is a limited traffic zone with cameras, the ring roads are busy, and summer heat makes stop-start traffic very uncomfortable. Park on the edge and walk. The real riding lies just outside the city: north into the Valpolicella, where narrow roads climb through terraced vineyards and cherry orchards to villages making Amarone, or further up onto the Lessinia plateau, with high pastures, stone huts and views over the whole Po plain on clear days. To the west, Lake Garda is less than forty kilometres away, and the Monte Baldo roads above its eastern shore are some of the best in the region.
Fuel is plentiful on the ring roads, less so in the centre. Verona eats well: try risotto all'Amarone, bigoli pasta with duck, or pastissada, a slow-cooked horse stew that is a local tradition, and the pandoro cake that was born here. Summer evenings, when the Arena lights up for the opera and the squares fill with people, are the best time to linger, but book a room well in advance during the festival season.