At midnight on New year’s Eve in Verona, they set off fireworks above L’Arena, the 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre. We’d never seen that before, but timed our visit right this year to check it out. The fireworks lasted for a full 15 minutes – impressive!

Below are a few photos that I took of the fireworks. If you click on one of the small photos, you’ll see a carousel-view of larger versions of the photos. I’ve also indicated in the titles that a couple of them include  a floating lantern that was separate from the firework display. We don’t know who launched these, but paper lanterns with a flame inside floated skyward periodically during the 15 minutes the fireworks went off. At any one time, I’d say there were no more than 2 or 3 of these visible.

When we asked our Verona friends about this, they weren’t sure why there were floating lanterns, as it is not generally a tradition in Verona on New Year’s. One of our friends, who lives in Verona but who is not originally from there, thought the floating lanterns reminded her of a scene in a recent Disney movie, Tangled. Note that the movie is called Rapunzel everywhere but in the U.S., where the marketing folks thought little boys would want to see the movie if it was called Tangled, instead of Rapunzel. Seriously.

Anyway, here’s a clip on YouTube that I found of the relevant scene from the movie. Note that in the initial shot in the clip, the lantern that you see does indeed resemble what we saw floating skyward in Verona during the fireworks.  Except there weren’t thousands of them in Verona like in the movie.

Maybe next year.