Magazine

It was 16 September 1786 when Johann Wolfgang Goethe arrived in Verona for the first time. The German writer — thirty-seven years old, already famous across Europe, travelling under a false name to avoid being recognised — was on his first journey through Italy. The first major city he encountered, coming down from the Brenner Pass, was Verona. What struck him was not a palace, not a church, not a masterpiece of painting. It was the Arena. He stepped down from his carriage, walked into the amphitheatre, climbed to the top, looked down. And wrote in his diary: ‘This amphitheatre is therefore the first remarkable monument of antiquity that I have seen, and in what a state of preservation!’ He had just done what Grand Tour travellers did by definition: he had walked inside history. Goethe did not know it, but he was repeating something that visitors to Verona had been doing for centuries. Because Verona is a city that cannot be understood standing still. It has to be read while walking.

It was 10 August 1913. The night was warm, the sky above Verona thick with stars, and the Arena was packed as it had not been in centuries. In the stalls and on the terraces, Veronese locals were mixed with visitors who had arrived from every corner of Europe and the Americas. In the audience were Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Arrigo Boito. And somewhere in the crowd, a thirty-one-year-old Czech writer making notes: Franz Kafka. On the stage, among monumental sets featuring Egyptian columns as tall as the Roman arches, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida was being performed. It was the first opera ever staged in the amphitheatre. The success was overwhelming. The next day’s newspapers wrote of ‘the delirious enthusiasm of a cosmopolitan crowd’. And on that August night, almost by accident, the greatest open-air opera season in the world was born. But the Arena had been standing for almost two thousand years. And its history, before arriving at that night in August, had been anything but romantic.

Every year, millions of tourists come to Verona looking for a balcony, a tomb, a courtyard. They are looking for something Shakespeare made immortal in 1596, almost three hundred years after the events — if they ever happened — were supposed to have taken place. The paradox is extraordinary: a story that may never have occurred has permanently transformed a real city. But behind the legend lies something more complex and more interesting than most visitors expect. The story of Romeo and Juliet was not born from Shakespeare’s imagination: it reached him after a journey of nearly a century, travelling from Italy through France to England, passing through the hands of at least five different writers. And Verona was already at the centre of it all, long before the Bard put pen to paper.

After dark, Verona becomes a different city. When tourists return to their hotels and the streets fall quiet, the low glow of lanterns casts long shadows across ancient Roman stones — and you get the distinct feeling that someone is still crossing those courtyards. That is not just atmosphere. It is history: layered, dark, and endlessly fascinating. If you think Verona is only Romeo and Juliet, the balcony, and the Arena, this article is written for you. Because the city holds mysteries that have lasted for centuries, and many of them live on the Colle di San Pietro and in the winding lanes that climb toward it — places that take on a completely different dimension after dark.

Some cities hide a second city inside themselves. Verona is one of them. Beneath Roman Verona, beneath the city of the Scaligeri, beneath the city of Shakespeare and opera, there is an older and far less known layer: sacred Verona — the city that in the Middle Ages was regarded as a little Jerusalem, Verona minor Hierusalem. This is not a poetic metaphor. It is an official title, engraved on a seal, built stone by stone along the banks of the Adige. And if you know where to look, that route is still there, almost intact, waiting for those curious enough to seek it out.