🇮🇹 Italy · Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria)
Verona is one of those Italian cities that have it all on a manageable scale: a two-thousand-year-old Roman Arena right in the centre, lovely medieval squares, Renaissance palaces, a river that wraps around it in a great curve and, on top of that, the romantic label of being 'the city of Romeo and Juliet'. It is so well placed — between Milan and Venice, a step from Lake Garda — that many people see it in passing in a day, but Verona deserves more: it is one of the prettiest and most enjoyable cities in northern Italy, with a life of squares, cafés and aperitivi that draws you in.
Its great symbol is the Arena, the Roman amphitheatre where gladiators fought twenty centuries ago and where today, every summer, one of the most famous open-air opera festivals in the world is held: hearing Aida or La Traviata under the stars, sitting on the same stone tiers the Romans used, is an experience with no equal. But Verona is much more than its Arena: it is Piazza delle Erbe over the old Roman forum, the Gothic tombs of the Scaligeri, Castelvecchio castle and its churches full of art.
This guide tells you the essentials with a practical, honest eye: what to see and what each verified admission costs, how the opera season works with its real dates and prices, how to get around and — yes — what is true about the famous Juliet's House, which we tell you straight. Because Verona really is wonderful, without needing to fully believe the legend that made it famous.
Verona was founded as a Roman colony in the 1st century BC, in a bend of the river Adige, and prospered thanks to its strategic position on the roads of northern Italy; from that period it keeps its jewel, the Arena, a 1st-century amphitheatre. After the fall of Rome it passed through the hands of Ostrogoths and Lombards, and in the Middle Ages it lived its second great moment under the lordship of the Della Scala family (the Scaligeri), who between the 13th and 14th centuries turned it into a powerful, refined court — the poet Dante arrived here in exile. In 1405 Verona handed itself to the Republic of Venice, under whose rule it stayed for almost four centuries, until Napoleon put an end to la Serenissima in 1797. It was then Austrian until 1866, when it joined the Kingdom of Italy. Its worldwide fame, however, came from literature: Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet here, and that love story turned Verona into a romantic destination for the whole world. The full story, with imperial Rome, the Scaligeri, Venice and Shakespeare, is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There are few cities where you can sit on the same stone tiers the Romans used twenty centuries ago and, on top of that, listen to an opera. Verona is one of them, and that continuity — two thousand years of unbroken life — is the key to its history.
The city was born in a strategic spot: a bend in the river Adige, the most important in northern Italy after the Po, at the point where the river leaves the Alps for the plain. That meander offered natural defence on three sides and a ford for crossing, and the great roads linking Rome with northern Europe ran through it: the Via Postumia and the Via Claudia Augusta. Verona became a Roman municipium in 49 BC, under Julius Caesar, and quickly prospered as a road junction and a military stronghold.
Traces of that Roman Verona remain all over the city. The most spectacular is the Arena, the great amphitheatre built around the middle of the 1st century AD, able to hold some 30,000 spectators who came to watch gladiator fights and wild-beast hunts. It is one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres in the world: although earthquakes brought down almost all of its outer ring of pink stone (only a fragment survives, the Ala), the inner tiers are practically intact, which has allowed it to be used without a break for centuries. But it is not the only remnant: there is also the Roman Theatre, set against the slope of the San Pietro hill on the other side of the river; the stone arches that were gates in the walls, such as Porta Borsari and Porta Leoni; and the layout of the forum, still alive beneath today's Piazza delle Erbe, to this day the heart of the city. Verona is not a city with Roman ruins: it is a Roman city that has never stopped being lived in.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Verona lived through the turbulent centuries of the invasions. It was the capital of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great at the start of the 6th century — Germanic legend would remember him as 'Dietrich von Bern', that is, 'of Verona' — and then passed through the hands of the Lombards and of Charlemagne's Franks. In the Middle Ages it became a free commune, a city-state governed by its own citizens, caught up like all of Italy in the struggles between Guelphs (backers of the Pope) and Ghibellines (backers of the emperor).
Verona's great moment came with the Della Scala family, known as the Scaligeri after the ladder (scala) on their coat of arms. Between 1262 and 1387 they ruled the city as lords (a signoria), and under them Verona reached a political, military and cultural splendour that placed it among the most brilliant courts in Italy. They came to control a broad territory in the north which at its height included cities such as Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Lucca and even Parma.
The most famous figure of the dynasty was Cangrande I della Scala ('the Big Dog'), who ruled between 1308 and 1329 and turned his court into a refuge for artists and poets. Among them was none other than Dante Alighieri, who after being exiled from Florence spent years in Verona under Cangrande's protection, dedicating part of his Divine Comedy (the Paradiso) to him. There is still a statue of Dante in Piazza dei Signori, at the heart of Scaligeri power. The material legacy of this period is enormous: the Castelvecchio castle and its fortified bridge over the Adige, built around 1354-1356; the towers and palaces of the central squares; and above all the Arche Scaligere, the spectacular Gothic mausoleums where the lords had themselves buried beneath equestrian statues, one of the most impressive medieval funerary ensembles in Europe. It was in this Verona of rival families and power struggles that, two centuries later, an English playwright would set the most famous love story of all time.
Scaligeri power faded at the end of the 14th century, amid internal struggles and pressure from stronger neighbours. After a brief spell under the Visconti of Milan, in 1405 Verona handed itself to the Republic of Venice, la Serenissima, and was absorbed into its mainland territories (the Stato da Terra). A new, long period began that would last almost four centuries.
The Venetian centuries were generally peaceful and stable, although the city went through very hard episodes such as the plague of 1630, the same one that ravaged much of northern Italy and carried off a large share of the population. Venice governed Verona through its rettori and fortified it as a key stronghold in the western defence of its territories: even today the winged lion of St Mark, symbol of la Serenissima, crowns a column in Piazza delle Erbe and appears carved on walls and gates all over the city, a reminder of those centuries. Verona flourished as a commercial and artistic centre, and took on the taste and fashions of refined Venetian culture.
That long stability ended abruptly when European history burst in. In 1797, during his Italian campaigns, General Napoleon Bonaparte put an end to the thousand-year Republic of Venice. That year Verona saw a violent popular revolt against the French occupation, the so-called Pasque Veronesi (Veronese Easters), which was crushed. Under the Treaty of Campo Formio, Napoleon carved up the territory, and after the final fall of the Napoleonic empire the Congress of Vienna (1815) handed Verona and the whole Veneto to the Austrian Empire. The Austrians turned the city into one of the four great fortresses of the 'Quadrilateral', their defensive system in Italy, and filled it with walls and military bastions. Verona stayed under Austrian rule until 1866, when, after the Third Italian War of Independence, it finally joined the Kingdom of Italy along with the rest of the Veneto.
If Verona is today a romantic destination known across the planet, it is not because of its Roman emperors or the Scaligeri, but because of a play written by an Englishman who never set foot in Italy. Around 1595, William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy of two young lovers from enemy families — the Montagues and the Capulets — which he explicitly set in Verona ("In fair Verona, where we lay our scene…").
It is worth being clear about what is history and what is literature. Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters: they never existed. Shakespeare did not invent the plot but took it from earlier Italian tales, above all a novella by the Veronese writer Luigi da Porto from the early 16th century, which already set the story in Verona in Scaligeri times and spoke of the rival families; those tales in turn drew on still older traditions. The Veronese setting made literary sense: the medieval Verona of the signorie and of feuding factions was the perfect stage for a tragedy of family hatred.
In time, the play's worldwide fame created a tourist demand the city knew how to make use of. That is how the 'sites' of Romeo and Juliet came about, which are in fact fairly recent constructions. The 'House of Juliet', on Via Cappello, is a medieval building that belonged to the Dal Cappello family — a surname that sounded like 'Capulet'; the city bought it and, in the 1930s and 1940s, added the famous balcony, assembled from fragments of a 14th-century marble sarcophagus kept in the Castelvecchio museum, to give visitors the setting they were looking for. There is also a supposed 'Tomb of Juliet' in a former convent, and a 'House of Romeo'. None of this has any historical basis, but that has not taken away the power of the myth: every year crowds arrive to leave love letters, touch Juliet's bronze statue or attach padlocks. What is interesting is that the legend rests on a very real Verona: that of the medieval palaces, the squares and the families that fought over power, which you can walk through and which gives the myth its true setting.
Modern Verona, now Italian, followed the country's fortunes. It grew as an industrial city and above all as a great transport hub: because of its position, at the crossing of the railway linking Milan with Venice and the line running up to the Brenner and northern Europe, it became one of the country's main connection points, a role it keeps today with high-speed rail.
The 20th century left it scars. During the Second World War, after Mussolini's fall and the German occupation, Verona was the scene of dramatic events: in 1944 the 'Verona trial' was held here, in which the fascist regime of the Republic of Salò tried and sentenced to death several of its own leaders who had voted to remove Mussolini, among them his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. The city suffered Allied bombing, and in the last days of the war, in 1945, the retreating Germans blew up every historic bridge over the Adige, including the Roman Ponte Pietra and the medieval Ponte Scaligero at Castelvecchio. Both were patiently rebuilt after the war, recovering the original stones and bricks from the riverbed: that is why we can cross them again today.
In 2000, Unesco listed the historic centre of Verona as World Heritage, recognising it as an exceptional example of a city that has preserved, continuously over more than two thousand years, evidence of every one of its periods: Roman, Scaligeri medieval, Venetian and modern. Today Verona lives on tourism, trade and wine — it is the capital of one of Italy's most prestigious wine regions, that of Valpolicella and Amarone, and hosts Vinitaly, the country's biggest wine fair. And its vocation as a stage lives on: every summer, the Roman Arena becomes the largest open-air opera house in the world, and every night, on its thousand-year-old tiers, thousands of people light a small candle before the music begins. Few cities embody so well the idea that in Italy the past is not a museum but a place where people still live.