4. Verona: Crimes Scenes City Walking Tour
A trail of blood can be followed throughout the centuries of Verona’s history: from the sand covered ground of the Roman Arena, which absorbed human and animal blood of ferocious combat and executions, up to Saint Peter’s castle where in Longobard times blood was drunk out of a human skull, to the river Adige where 2000 Paduan prisoners have been slaughtered by a tyrant in the Middle Ages. The meanders of the town illumine a history of heinous crime scenes and unresolved mysteries.
For each balcony decorated with flowers and illuminated by the sunlight, there is the equivalent of a tenebrous street inhabited by rats. Every town, including Verona, has its dark corners, where evilness and sin hide within ravines. It’s a land of wine, but of blood as well, and it is difficult to make out which of these two liquid substances flowed to majority throughout more than two millennia of history. In the hometown of Romeo and Juliet, little streets, small sections of the town and the bends of the river became the stage of far more tragic events. Verona possesses a black soul as well. On the other hand, let him who is without sin cast the first stone: the idyllic community does not exist.
This itinerary which commences with real historic facts, such as the duels to the death among gladiators, subsequently focuses on long forgotten tragic events which took place in Verona, trying to cast light and possibly understand the crimes. The young and naïve Isolina Canuti, the ambiguous personality of Countess Frola Milani, the prostitutes Bernardina Ferrarese and Giuseppina Baruffolo, as well as unlucky Carlotta Aschieri are involved in just a portion of long forgotten tales, which recently have been enriched with unknown details, thus casting a sinister image upon the scaligerous town.