Roman Verona: the city the Romans built to last two thousand years

Verona was Roman before it was medieval, before it was Shakespearean, before it became all the things tourists usually come looking for. And of that Roman Verona, strangely, a great deal survives — far more than you would expect walking through the old town without knowing where to look.

Almost everyone knows the Arena. But how many know that the foundations of the Roman forum still lie beneath Piazza delle Erbe? That Porta Borsari was originally called Porta Iovia, dedicated to Jupiter, and that its present name comes from the medieval soldiers who collected tolls there? That Ponte Pietra, the city’s oldest bridge, was blown up in 1945 and rebuilt by recovering its stone blocks one by one from the riverbed?

Roman Verona is not a closed chapter of ancient history. It is a city still alive beneath the modern one, legible to anyone who knows how to read it.

A location no one chooses by chance

The Romans did not found cities at random. When, in the 1st century BC, they turned Verona from a small settlement into a planned colony, they did so because that position was worth its weight in gold strategically.

There is the river Adige, which makes an almost complete loop around the urban area: it defends three sides of the city without the need to build walls. There is the Via Postumia — the great consular road that linked Genoa to Aquileia across the whole Po Valley — which passes right through here, turning Verona into the most important road junction in northern Italy. There is Lake Garda a few kilometres away, then called Benacus, ensuring water resources and communication towards the Alpine arc. And there is the Brennero, the natural pass towards northern Europe, reached by following the Adige valley upstream.

Roman generals understood at once that whoever controlled Verona controlled the traffic between the Mediterranean and central Europe. The city was planned accordingly: with the orthogonal precision typical of Rome, with a forum at its centre, with paved streets that would last for centuries.

The Arena: built outside the walls, become the heart of the city

The Arena of Verona is the third largest Roman amphitheatre still standing in the world, after the Colosseum and the Amphitheatre of Capua. It was built in the mid-1st century AD, outside the walls of the Roman city — like almost all Roman amphitheatres, to avoid crowds gathering in the urban centre during the shows. It could hold around 30,000 spectators.

A detail almost no one knows: in 69 AD, during the war between Vitellius and Vespasian, the emperor Vespasian chose Verona as a military base precisely because the Arena stood outside the walls, rendering them useless for defence. He then had an extra ditch dug to the south of the city — the Adigetto — which later became one of the features of the medieval urban landscape.

What we see today is almost entirely the original amphitheatre, with one great difference: nearly the whole outer ring is missing. Only a single fragment survives on the north side — four arches that the Veronese call the Ala (the Wing) — showing how the structure must have looked before a powerful earthquake in 1183 destroyed the third ring of arches. The fallen material was used to build the medieval city. The Arena has always recycled its own rubble.

Porta Iovia: the entrance pilgrims saw first

Those arriving in Verona along the Via Postumia from the west, from Genoa or Milan, found themselves before Porta Borsari. In Roman times it was called Porta Iovia — after the temple dedicated to Jupiter Lustralis that stood nearby. It was the main entrance to the city, and as such it had been built with full honours: two superimposed orders of arched windows, Corinthian columns, decorations that conveyed the power and prestige of Verona.

The name Borsari arrives much later, in the Middle Ages, from the bursarii — the soldiers stationed here to collect duties on goods in transit. It is one of those cases in which the medieval name has overshadowed the Roman one, yet the building still tells its original story clearly: you can see it in the symmetry of the façade, in the proportions of the arches, in the quality of the Veronese limestone used.

Passing under Porta Borsari literally means entering the Roman city. Beyond the arch, the avenue that opens ahead — first Corso Cavour, then Corso Porta Borsari — follows exactly the decumanus maximus, the east-west axis of the Roman plan. You walk on a road the Romans laid out two thousand years ago.

Piazza delle Erbe: the forum beneath the market

Piazza delle Erbe is one of the liveliest squares in Italy, with its market stalls, its frescoed palaces, the noise and colour typical of a place lived in for centuries. What almost no one imagines, walking across it, is that they are walking over the ancient Roman forum of Verona.

The forum was the political, economic and religious centre of every Roman city: the place of assemblies, of the tribunal, of the main temple. In Verona it stood exactly here, in the area that still coincides with the square today. Beneath the cobblestones and the foundations of the palaces lie the remains of the Capitolium — the temple dedicated to the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva — found during 19th-century excavations and still partly visitable in the basements of some buildings.

The crossing of the decumanus maximus with the cardo maximus — the north-south axis — took place right here, in the forum area. This means that Piazza delle Erbe is the exact point around which the four Roman engineers charged with founding the colony designed the entire city. The medieval market, the café tables, the souvenir stalls: all of it above the cross that Rome traced two thousand years ago.

Ponte Pietra: five arches, three eras, a single story

Ponte Pietra is the oldest bridge in Verona, and one of the best documented Roman bridges in Italy. Its history probably begins before 89 BC — its lack of alignment with the Roman street grid suggests it already existed before the colony was planned, perhaps as a primitive crossing of the natural ford of the Adige.

What makes Ponte Pietra visually unique is the diversity of its materials: the two arches on the left side are still the original Roman ones, in white stone. The two arches on the right are medieval, in red brick, rebuilt between the 13th and 14th centuries by the Scaligeri. The central arch is Venetian, dating from 1520, the work of Fra’ Giocondo. The bridge is an atlas of Veronese architecture, legible in five spans.

On 24 April 1945 the retreating German soldiers blew up all the city’s bridges. Of Ponte Pietra, only the arch towards the city remained intact. What happened next is one of the finest stories in the history of Italian conservation: the superintendent Piero Gazzola decided to rebuild the bridge by anastylosis — recovering every single stone block from the riverbed, cataloguing it and putting it back in its place. The works lasted from 1957 to 1959. The bridge you walk on today is made of the same blocks as the Roman one. Every stone was fished out, numbered, restored to its place.

The Roman Theatre and the Archaeological Museum: across the Adige

On the left bank of the Adige, at the foot of the Colle di San Pietro, stands a second great Roman monument that most tourists never reach: the Roman Theatre. Built in the 1st century BC, it exploits the natural slope of the hill for the cavea — the solution typical of Roman theatres, the opposite of amphitheatres, which support themselves structurally. The stage faced the river; the backdrop behind the scene was the sky and the hills.

The Roman Theatre never fell completely out of use: in the Middle Ages houses and churches were built over it, concealing it for centuries. It was rediscovered and excavated in the 19th century. Today it hosts the Estate Teatrale Veronese every summer. To perform or watch a show there, with the lit city in the background and the river below, is an experience unlike any other theatre in the world.

Above the theatre, reached by a lift carved into the rock, is the Archaeological Museum of Verona: mosaics, inscriptions, statues, objects of daily life that tell how people lived in the Verona of the 1st-4th centuries AD. It is the right place to connect all the pieces seen around the city into one overall story.