Romeo and Juliet in Verona: the real history behind Shakespeare’s myth

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.

Before Shakespeare: Luigi da Porto and the birth of the story

The story of Romeo and Juliet was first written down not in England but in the Veneto, in 1531. Its author was Luigi da Porto, a nobleman and military captain from Vicenza who had been left paralysed during the Wars of the League of Cambrai. He set his “Historia novellatamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti” in Verona, during the rule of Bartolomeo della Scala — the brother of Cangrande, the same man who had sheltered Dante in the city.

The choice of Verona was deliberate. Da Porto had read Dante, and knew that in Canto VI of the Purgatorio the poet explicitly cited the Montecchi and the Cappelletti as rival families symbolising the factional violence tearing medieval Italy apart. Those names already carried weight. Da Porto took them and built a tragic love story around them.

The Montecchi — more often called Monticoli — were a real Ghibelline family from Verona. The Cappelletti were primarily a Guelph family from Cremona, long confused by tradition with the Veronese. The earliest documented trace of a Cappelletti family in Verona dates only to 1427 — more than a century after the events the legend describes.

The long journey to Shakespeare: from Bandello to the Bard

Da Porto’s story was well received and began to spread. In 1554, the prolific Italian novelist Matteo Bandello reworked it in his collection of tales, enriching it with vivid details: he added the figure of the nurse, described Verona’s locations with precision, and made the characters feel more real. It was Bandello’s version that spread across Europe.

Translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559 — who added layers of moralism and sentiment — the story then crossed into English: first as prose in William Painter’s collection (1567), then as a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke in 1562. It was this last text — Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” — that served as Shakespeare’s primary source when he wrote his tragedy between 1594 and 1596.

This journey across languages also reveals a detail that often goes unnoticed: the shift from Cappelletti to Capulet. Da Porto used “Cappelletti”, and so did Bandello. But when Boaistuau translated the story into French, the Italian names were slightly distorted in transit — as names tend to be. Brooke picked up that adapted form, and Shakespeare inherited it almost unchanged. The result is that the name by which the entire world knows Juliet’s family — Capuleti in Italian, Capulet in English — is an accumulation of small distortions, carried from one language to the next. The real Cappelletti of Verona, if they ever existed, would not have recognised their own name.

Shakespeare never set foot in Verona. He knew the city through the pages of others, and transformed it into the most famous setting in world literature. The Prince of Verona — “Escalus” in the original text — clearly echoes the Scaligeri. The rival family bears the name of their historical enemies. The Verona Shakespeare imagined is built on genuine medieval reality, filtered through decades of rewriting.

Juliet’s House: how a tourist myth is made

The courtyard at Via Cappello 23 is today one of the most visited sites in Italy. Yet its history as “Juliet’s House” is far more recent than most people assume. The building was documented in 1351 as a simple “hospitium a cappello” — an inn bearing the symbol of a hat — owned by the heirs of one Antonio Cappello. Its identification with the Capulets of Shakespeare came much later, through popular attribution: nineteenth-century tourists, already captivated by the tragedy, searched insistently for the settings of the story, and the hat on the gateway seemed evidence enough.

The famous balcony — the symbol of the most celebrated scene in world theatre — was added to the building in the twentieth century, adapted from an ancient stone sarcophagus. The statue of Juliet in the courtyard is the work of sculptor Nereo Costantini and dates from 1969. The Club di Giulietta — the association that replies to love letters sent from around the world to “Juliet, Verona, Italy” — was founded in 1972. The myth was built layer by layer, in relatively recent times, around a story that never had a single definitive historical source.

Yet this does not make it less real. A place that has received love letters from every corner of the world for decades, that has inspired films, performances and pilgrimages, that has changed how an entire city is perceived globally, has its own cultural weight that goes well beyond any question of historical authenticity.

The Verona Shakespeare imagined: the places of the myth

Walking through Shakespearean Verona means moving across two overlapping layers: the historical medieval city — the Verona of the Scaligeri, of rival factions, of Guelph and Ghibelline conflict — and the literary one, constructed by da Porto, Bandello, Brooke and finally Shakespeare on top of that reality.

Piazza dei Signori is the political heart of Scaligeri Verona, the place where the Prince of Verona would have exercised his authority. It is here that verdicts, condemnations and pardons are pronounced in the tragedy. The Scaligeri palaces surrounding the square are the same ones Dante frequented: the overlap between Dante’s Verona and Shakespeare’s Verona in the same physical space is one of the most extraordinary details of this city.

The Church of Santa Anastasia, a Gothic masterpiece of the fourteenth century, forms the backdrop of the medieval Verona the story’s characters would have inhabited. Piazza delle Erbe — the ancient Roman forum, the commercial heart of the medieval city — is exactly the kind of open space where brawls between the two factions could have erupted at any moment. The Casa di Romeo in Via Arche Scaligere did genuinely belong to a Montecchi family: the Monticoli, a Ghibelline house documented in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Verona.

And then there is the Tomb of Juliet, in a former Franciscan convent a short distance from the centre: a medieval marble sarcophagus that tradition has linked to the heroine of the legend. Even here the details interlock suggestively — Friar Lawrence in the play echoes the Franciscans who ran that convent. The pieces fit together in compelling ways, even when the story is clearly literary rather than historical.

Shakespeare and Verona: the other play almost everyone forgets

Romeo and Juliet is not Shakespeare’s only work set in Verona. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” — considered one of his earliest comedies, written around 1590 — tells the story of two friends, Valentine and Proteus, who leave Verona for Milan and find themselves caught up in romantic entanglements and forest adventures. Verona appears as a point of departure and of return, as the place of roots and identity.

The fact that Shakespeare chose Verona as the setting for two different works — a tragedy and a comedy — is not incidental. In his imagination, and in that of his contemporaries, Verona was already synonymous with a romantic, dramatic Italy: a city well-known enough to be credible as a setting, yet distant enough to be freely reinvented.