Places to see in Verona & Lake Garda

A fourteenth-century castle on the river, remodelled by Carlo Scarpa in the 1960s into what architects still travel to see — the building and the intervention are the exhibit as much as the paintings. The fortified bridge beside it is free to walk across. Two hours for anyone who cares about buildings.

Verona's largest square, and the Roman arena stands on it — a first-century amphitheatre still in use, which in summer means opera performed to fifteen thousand people under the open sky. Cushion hire and a cheap stone step are part of the experience. By day the arena can be walked into; by night the square is where the city eats.

One of the finest Romanesque churches in Italy, twenty minutes' walk west of the centre and largely missed because of it. Bronze door panels from the eleventh century, a Mantegna altarpiece, and a crypt where Shakespeare set the marriage. Calm even when the rest of Verona is not.

The terrace across the river, up either a funicular or a stiff set of steps, looking straight down on the Roman theatre and the whole curve of the old city. Free, open, and the place to be half an hour before sunset. Ten minutes from the centre on foot plus the climb.

The tower over Piazza delle Erbe, and the best view in Verona — the river bend, the roofs, the hills behind. A lift covers most of it with a short climb at the top. Twenty minutes, and the market square below is the reason to be in that part of town anyway.

A medieval house with a balcony added in the twentieth century to satisfy visitors, in a courtyard whose walls are covered in graffiti and chewing gum. Included here because everyone asks and it is thirty seconds off the main street — but it is a photograph rather than a visit, and the paid interior adds little.