Verona

Top things to do in Verona

1. 01

   Arena di Verona - the Roman amphitheatre still in use

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   Built in the first century and big enough for most of the Roman town, it lost its outer ring to a medieval earthquake apart from one surviving fragment, the ala, which still stands four storeys high on the square side and shows what the whole shell once looked like. The inner bowl came through intact: an ellipse of pink and white limestone tiers you can walk into and sit on. It has been used almost continuously ever since, for markets, tournaments, executions and finally, from the early twentieth century, for a summer season of open-air opera staged on a scale that only works because the building is this size. Out of season you go in during the day and have the tiers to yourself.

2. 02

   Piazza delle Erbe - the market square built on the Roman forum

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   A long, narrow, slightly crooked square on the exact footprint of the forum, hemmed in by buildings from every century: a fourteenth-century merchants' house, painted facades, a baroque palace at the north end with statues of gods along its roofline, and a column carrying the winged lion of Venice. The fountain in the middle is a Roman statue re-carved in the fourteenth century and known as Madonna Verona. Under the arch at the corner hangs a whale rib, up there for centuries with no agreed explanation. Stalls sell fruit, souvenirs and hats under white umbrellas, and the cafe tables around the edge are the best seats in the city for the evening.

3. 03

   Torre dei Lamberti - the tower above the market, with a lift

   scenic history

   Begun in the twelfth century in brick and tufa and raised twice since, it is the tallest thing in the old centre and hangs directly over the market square. Two bells sit at the top with names and jobs: one called the militia out, the other marked the working hours. A lift covers most of the climb and steps do the last stretch, and the reward is the only view that puts the amphitheatre, the river bend, the roof tiles and the hills into a single frame. Go early or at the end of the day, when the light rakes across the roofs.

4. 04

   Casa di Giulietta - the balcony that was added to fit the story

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   A genuine thirteenth-century house that belonged to the Dal Cappello family, whose name was close enough to Capulet for the city to make the leap. The balcony is a twentieth-century addition assembled from an old sarcophagus, the bronze statue in the courtyard is rubbed shiny by generations of hands, and the walls have been scrawled on, stuck with letters and periodically scrubbed clean. Knowing all that does not stop the courtyard being interesting, though what you are watching is a crowd rather than a monument. A supposed tomb sits in a crypt across the river and a Romeo house stands a few streets away, unmarked and private.

5. 05

   Castelvecchio and the Ponte Scaligero - a warlord's castle, bridge and museum

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   Red brick, crenellated and built in the 1350s as much against the citizens as against invaders, with a fortified bridge over the Adige that gave the ruling family a private escape route towards the Alps. Both were blown up in 1945 and rebuilt from stone dredged out of the river. Inside, the museum was redesigned in the 1960s by Carlo Scarpa in what is still one of the most admired museum interiors anywhere: raw concrete, steel and old stone set against each other, routes that cut through the fabric of the castle, and the medieval equestrian statue of Cangrande I hung outdoors on a cantilever at head height, grinning. The collection runs from Veronese Gothic panels to Pisanello, Mantegna, Bellini and Tintoretto.

6. 06

   Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore - bronze doors and Mantegna's altarpiece

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The great Romanesque church of the north, out beyond the old walls over the tomb of the city's African-born patron saint. The front has a rose window carved as a wheel of fortune, a porch resting on crouching lions, and doors set with dozens of bronze panels, the oldest from the eleventh century, telling Bible stories and the saint's miracles with the blunt directness of folk carving rather than court art. Inside, a raised presbytery over a broad crypt of columns, walls scribbled with layers of half-erased fresco, and above the altar Mantegna's Madonna and saints, painted for this spot with a painted architecture that continues the real frame. A freestanding campanile and an abbey tower stand alongside.

7. 07

   Piazza dei Signori and the Arche Scaligere - the civic square and the family tombs

   history culture arts

   Step through an arch off the market and the noise stops: a smaller, harder, colder square ringed by the medieval town hall, the Venetian governor's palace and a fine Renaissance loggia, with a nineteenth-century statue of Dante in the middle because he spent much of his exile here under the lords of Verona. Round the corner the family buried itself in public: Gothic canopies stacked over sarcophagi, mounted effigies on top, behind a wrought-iron screen patterned with the ladder that was the family badge. It is a strange and very medieval thing to find at street level between two churches.

8. 08

   Duomo di Verona - Titian's Assumption and the cathedral complex behind it

   culture arts history

   A Romanesque front with a two-storey porch on griffins and carved figures of Charlemagne's paladins, opening into a nave of red Verona marble with tall painted piers. The first chapel on the left holds an Assumption by Titian in a frame designed by the local Renaissance architect Sanmicheli. The complex behind is the better half: a cloister with the excavated mosaic floors of the early Christian churches that stood here first, an octagonal baptistery whose font is carved from a single block of marble with reliefs around its sides, and a chapter library that has been in continuous use since late antiquity and holds manuscripts older than most European countries.

9. 09

   Sant'Anastasia - the hunchbacks and Pisanello's Saint George

   culture arts history

   The biggest church in the city, Dominican Gothic in bare brick, its facade still unfinished after seven hundred years. Just inside the door, two holy water basins rest on the backs of crouching carved figures known to everyone as the gobbi, the hunchbacks, one of them modelled on a real beggar. The reason to come is high up over a chapel arch at the far end: Pisanello's fresco of Saint George setting out to fight the dragon, all courtly hats, horses and a gallows in the middle distance, the finest thing of its kind left in Italy and easy to miss without looking up.

10. 10

    Teatro Romano and Castel San Pietro - the far bank and the view

    history scenic

    Across the river the hillside holds a Roman theatre older than the amphitheatre, cut into the slope with its seating still climbing towards a church and a convent that were built straight on top of it; the convent is now the archaeological museum, and summer performances still run on the stage below. Above it, steps or a short funicular reach the terrace at Castel San Pietro, an Austrian barracks on the site of a Visconti castle, where you get the picture the city is known for: bridges, red roofs, campanili and the Adige swinging round the whole old town.

11. 11

    Ponte Pietra - the Roman bridge put back together out of the river

    history scenic

    Two of its arches are original Roman work in white stone and the rest is medieval brick, which is why it changes colour halfway across. Retreating troops destroyed it in 1945 along with every other bridge in Verona, and it was rebuilt over the following years using stone recovered from the riverbed, so what you walk on is largely the original material reassembled. Stand on it in the last hour of light with the hill and the theatre on one side and the old town on the other; it is the single best free thing in the city.

12. 12

    Giardino Giusti - a Renaissance garden climbing the cliff

    nature wildlife history scenic

    Laid out behind a palace on the quiet side of the river in the late sixteenth century and barely altered since: box hedges cut into patterns, a straight avenue of enormous cypresses, a grotto, a small maze, and a monstrous face carved into the rock face halfway up. Terraces and a stair up the cliff lead to a belvedere with the whole city below. Goethe wrote about it, and it is the one place in Verona where you can hear birds instead of crowds ten minutes from the market square.

13. 13

    Porta Borsari, Porta Leoni and the Arco dei Gavi - Roman Verona at street level

    history

    The old town still runs on the Roman grid, and the gates are simply part of it: a first-century gate front stands in the middle of a shopping street with its inscription intact and traffic passing through, another sits half-swallowed by a later building with the excavated Roman road surface exposed in a pit beside it, and a triumphal arch that once straddled the road out of town was dismantled by Napoleon's troops and re-erected beside the castle. Walking between the three is the cheapest archaeology lesson in the Veneto.

14. 14

    Osterie of the old town - pastissada, pearà and a glass of Valpolicella

    food

    Verona eats heavily and locally: bigoli, a thick rough spaghetti, with duck or anchovy; potato gnocchi, which the city treats as its own; boiled meats served with pearà, a thick pepper sauce made with bone marrow and breadcrumbs that exists almost nowhere else; pastissada de caval, a long-braised horse stew with polenta that people either love or refuse; and hard alpine cheese from the hills above town. To drink, a light Valpolicella or Bardolino by the glass at lunch, Soave if you want white, and Amarone or the sweet Recioto with the cheese at the end.

Getting to & around Verona

Know before you go