Verona art city, Valpolicella wine tasting full day private tour 

VERONA

The city of Verona is known worldwide for Romeo and Juliet legend and for the opera season which takes place on summer evenings in the magnificent scenery of a Roman amphitheater. Verona is primarily a beautiful city of art, located at the foot of the last offshoots of the Alps. The town is crossed by the second-longest Italian river, the Adige, that descends from the Alpine valleys into the Adriatic sea.

The city has important monuments: Roman Amphitheater, Theaters, walls and gates, and also beautiful Romanesque and Gothic churches (San Zeno, the Cathedral, St. Anastasia, St. Fermo, Santa Maria Antica with the "Arche Scaligere"). We can find interesting public buildings (ancient palaces around Piazza Erbe, Piazza Dante, and Castelvecchio now the Civic art Museum) and private especially of the Renaissance period, due to the genius of Michele Sammicheli, and other architects. Verona is known as the second art city of the Veneto region just after Venice.

Verona has experienced moments of splendor with the Scaligeri, with special guests such as the Florentine Dante Alighieri. And William Shakespeare has used the scenery of Verona for Romeo and Juliet, the story of two young lovers, whose legendary tomb, with the house and the famous balcony, are annually visited by thousands of tourists.

To be reported the remains of fortifications from different eras: parts of the Roman period almost 2000 years ago (two gates have been preserved: Porta Borsari and Porta Leoni), the medieval and Renaissance walls that enclose a wide area of the ancient city, those of the Austrian domination and barracks scattered around the town, and on all the surrounding hills

VALPOLICELLA

The Valpolicella is located in the province of Verona, northwest of the city, close to the reliefs in between Verona and the Adige Valley near Lake Garda, with whom the Valpolicella has in common, thanks to the sun exposure and mild temperatures, an almost Mediterranean climate and a gentle landscape of vineyards and olive groves, dotted with cypress trees.

The Valpolicella is not a single valley, but an integrated set of three major valleys almost parallel and sloping from north to south (those of Negrar, Marano, and Fumane), forming an area of undulating hills, gentle slopes, of small gathered hollows, ranging from 80m above sea level along the river Adige to 1540mt of the watershed from Trentino region. The landscape has an evocative variety of panoramas.

The underground sedimentary rocks allowed, since ancient times, the extraction and the processing of Verona marble and Prun Stone, also used for the construction of the ancient buildings of Verona, Venice, and other Italian cities.

The Valpolicella makes very nice red wines, but the most important and well known all over the world is the Amarone. In the 6th century, Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator praised the great quality of the Acinaticus, a wine produced in the Valpolicella area. Today, we can consider the Amarone to be a direct descendant of this Acinaticus, a wine that has been so well praised in ancient times. However, the ancestor of the Acinaticus was very different from the current Amarone. It was a dense and sweetish wine that is probably more similar to today's Recioto.