Verona trip planner

A vacation guide to Verona, the fair city where Shakespeare set Romeo & Juliet

You could spend all day in Verona, or just knock off the major sights (plus lunch) in six hours or so. Drop your bags at the train station left luggage office and grab bus no. 72 or 73 to the Via Cappello stop on Via Stella, just down from the central bustling marketplace on Piazza delle Erbe.

Just a few hundred yards away is the famous "Juliet's balcony" (in short: Shakespeare chose approximations of the names of two real rival families in Verona for his play, but the plot is, of course, made up—or, rather, stolen from the Greeks; all the Romeo and Juliet–associated "sights" in Verona are fanciful, but fun Full Story).

Wander down the marble -slab pedestrian shopping street of Via Mazzini until you get to Piazza Brà and the Arena, a midget Colosseum—and most perfectly preserved ancient Roman amphitheater in Italy—where they still perform operas. It's well worth sticking around town and getting a hotel if there's a performance on for the night tickets are still available (not an issue, in my experience, and I've been three times). Full Story

Verona in depth

Verona reached a cultural and artistic peak during the 13th and 14th centuries under the powerful, often cruel, and sometimes quirky Della Scala, or Scaligeri, dynasty that took up rule in the late 1200s. In 1405, it surrendered to Venice, which remained in charge until the invasion of Napoléon in 1797.

The city retains its locked-in-time character that recalls its medieval and Renaissance heyday, as you can see from the bustling marketplace of the central Piazza Delle Erbe—on the former site of the Roman Forum and where chariot races once took place. Nearby are the Arche Scaligeri family tombs, some of the most elaborate Gothic funerary monuments in Italy.

Nestled on the banks of the swift-flowing Adige River, the Museo Castelvecchio is a crenellated fairy-tale pile of brick towers and turrets, commissioned in 1354 by the Scaligeri warlord Cangrande II (Big Dog II) to serve the dual role of residential palace and military stronghold. It survived centuries of occupation by the Visconti family, the Serene Republic of Venice, and then Napoléon, only to be destroyed by the Germans during World War II bombing and painstakingly restored. It now houses a museum of statues and carvings of the Middle Ages and Venetian masterworks by Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Veronese, and Bellini (and the Verona-born Pisanello).

But none of that's why every tour bus on its way to or from Venice stops here. No, half a million visitors flock to fair Verona, where we lay our scene, for the most famous town residents who never existed.

Of Romeo and Juliet

Yes, I'm sorry.

Despite the "Casa di Romeo Monterchi" (which became "Montague," in Shakespearian) with its excellent restaurant (one caution; the Veronesi love horse meat, so you might want to avoid anything that says "cavallo")

Despite "Juliet's Tomb" under the graceful medieval cloisters of a Capuchin monastery in the southern part of town

And despite this oh-so-romantic courtyard bang in the center of town where the tourist office slapped on a balcony in 1928 to help finish off the "Juliet' House" look, there is no proof that a Capuleti (Capulet) family ever lived here (or if they did, that a young girl called Juliet ever existed), and it wasn’t until 1905 that the city bought what was an abandoned, overgrown garden and decided its future.

Rumor is, this was once actually a whorehouse.

So what of Romeo and Juliet?

The Greek myth of Pyramis and Thisbee found its way, whisper-down-the-lane style, to Italy as a Sienese legend, first put into novella form in 1476. The story was subsequently retold in 1524 by Veneto-born Luigi da Porto. He chose Verona in the years 1302 to 1304, during the reign of the Scaligeri, and renamed the young couple Romeo and Giulietta. The popular storia d'amore was translated into English and became the source of and inspiration for Shakespeare's tale (no one ever said it was original—Shakespeare had already used the Pyramis and Thisbee story within A Midsummer Night's Dream, after all—though I would prefer to believe the version from the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love).

None of this, of course, stops countless thousands from leaving behind layer upon layer of graffiti along the lines of “Laura, ti amo!,” or who pose with the of the 20th-century bronze statue of a forever nubile Juliet—or who engage in the peculiar tradition (whose origin no one can seem to explain) of rubbing the heroine's right breast, which is now buffed to a bright gold.

My advice: stop by just before closing time, when the courtyard is relatively empty of tourists and it is easiest to imagine Romeo uttering, “But Soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”

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This material was last updated November 2010. All information was accurate at the time.

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