Today on Monday Mysteries we discover a mysterious fresco in Verona that I have now officially nicknamed “Brigadoon.”

Do you remember Brigadoon? It’s the musical set in Scotland about a town that appears only every 100 years, unless a person really believes that the town exists, and then that person can make the town appear again.  Or, at least, that’s my take-away of the plot of the movie, since at the end Gene Kelly is able to get back into the town because he believes that it (and Cyd Charisse, who lives there) is real and it appears to him out of the mist.

Chris and I had our first encounter with a “Brigadoon” years ago on the way to Verona from Bolzano, when a castle on the side of a rocky hillside would appear only at different times of day — unless you focussed and really believed it was there.

So today I want to talk about a similar phenomenon we’ve run across here in Verona.  Chris has been wandering around town the past couple of weeks exploring different parts of the city on his morning exercise walks. One morning last week he came back from his walk and commented that he’d seen an unusual fresco on a building on the other side of the Adige River, about a 5-10 minute walk from the apartment.

Now there are numerous fragments of old medieval frescos in Verona; at its heyday in the Middle Ages, Verona was in fact called the “City of Frescoes”, and many buildings still have faint traces of these paintings. What made this one that Chris saw last week remarkable, though, was that it was of a scene people walking in front of a town, with the town (in the fresco) probably being a representation of Verona. Normally, though, the frescos have mostly decorative flowers or stylized patterns, and not of scenes in a town per se.

So on Saturday afternoon we were walking around that part of town,  and Chris said he would show me this fresco.

Except … it wasn’t there.  We walked up and down the street where he thought he’d seen it, and we couldn’t find it.  He was extremely puzzled, as he was certain that we were in the right general area.

However Chris always takes his walks in the morning, not in the afternoon like we did on Saturday. So this morning on his walk he went back to that area, and lo and behold, he saw it again. I went over then, too, and quickly snapped a photo of this mysterious fresco with my cell phone camera, before it disappeared; the fresco is in the archway above the sign for the tattoo parlor:

Fresco on the building above the tattoo parlor

Of course, I think the real explanation of why it seems to “disappear” is really quite ordinary. I went back this afternoon to check it out, and the sun in the afternoon makes the balcony above it cast a really strong shadow on the fresco.  It’s very easy to overlook in the shadow unless you know that it’s there:

The fresco is hard to see in the shadow

The romantic in me, though, likes to think that it really is only visible to those who believe in Brigadoon, of course.  Once the secret of Brigadoon has been revealed, you can then make it out at any time of day. And also coax it out of the shadow in the digital darkroom:

“Brigadoon” fresco, Verona

Of course, I realize that an unexpected mystery today for all of you who subscribe to the blog was the mystery of the disappearing blog post.  A technical glitch posted the post just a little too early today and it took a while to sort it out.  Sorry for the confusion! It wasn’t intentional, but perhaps it was somehow appropriate to have that happen with a Monday Mystery blog post about Brigadoon.