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– At table 16 the Prince ate snails…
– What kind of wine did they have?
– Soave!
– No, they had Valpolicella.
– So, snails and Valpolicella…
(“La dolce vita”, by Federico Fellini – Oscar statuette).
In that celebrated film, V.I.P.s drink Soave or Valpolicella wine. Both of them produced exclusively in Verona. After the Dolce Vita Run, you’ll have a very good knowledge of the local history, the main monuments and, above all, some of the best Italian wines and the most famous Italian aperitif.
The fresh white Soave, (“What a wine!” Dante Alighieri, 1320), the red Valpolicella (“a light, dry red wine, as friendly as the house of a favourite brother”, Ernest Hemingway, 1950), the vibrant orange Spritz (“Has the Spritz the same colours of the sunset or is the sunset to have the colours of the spritz?”, Anonymous)
Verona Dolce Vita run is a funny way to run & visit, but – and it’s not a joke – alcohol is deeply part of our history and culture. The first Popes and the first Roman emperors such as Augustus didn’t drink the bad wine produced by the Romans, but imported Valpolicella wine to Rome… and also the Spritz aperitif, born during the period of the Habsburg domination in Veneto in the 1800s, has an interesting history.
Austrio-Hungarian soldiers and diplomats loved to drink local wine in the taverns, but the alcohol content was too high for them. They started to spray a bit of water into the wine (spritzen, in German) to make the wines lighter.
But, later on, the locals started to spray more alcohol into the wine with the aperitif Aperol… and now the most popular Spritz is composed of the Venetian Prosecco sparkling white wine, the Aperol from the nearby town of Padua, ice and a slice of orange.
In conclusion … our Verona Dolce vita tour has a taste of history in three different taverns and many stages running through the streets and monuments of the center: the streets of the typical taverns, the Arena, Juliet’s house, the view by the Adige river, romantic bridges, Roman excavations and the pointed monuments of gothic Verona.
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