It was 16 September 1786 when Johann Wolfgang Goethe arrived in Verona for the first time. The German writer \u2014 thirty-seven years old, already famous across Europe, travelling under a false name to avoid being recognised \u2014 was on his first journey through Italy. The first major city he encountered, coming down from the Brenner Pass, was Verona.<\/p>
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: \u2018This amphitheatre is therefore the first remarkable monument of antiquity that I have seen, and in what a state of preservation!\u2019 He had just done what Grand Tour travellers did by definition: he had walked inside history.<\/p>
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.<\/p>
When the Romans founded Verona in the first century BC, they built it around a street system designed for movement. The cardo \u2014 the north-south axis \u2014 and the decumanus \u2014 the east-west axis \u2014 crossed at the forum, which is today Piazza delle Erbe. From that point, everything else in the city was organised around the human pace: distances, the proportions of public buildings, the position of the amphitheatre outside the walls to allow the crowd to leave quickly.<\/p>
The Arena itself is a machine for walking: its sixty-four vomitoria \u2014 the technical name for the entrance tunnels \u2014 were designed to move thirty thousand people in and out in the shortest possible time. The system worked so well that the same principle is still used today when designing modern stadiums.<\/p>
That logic spread through the whole city. Verona is compact, dense, layered. Every era left traces on top of the previous ones, and there is only one way to read them: walk slowly, look up, stop where something seems out of place. Because that is often where the most interesting history is hiding.<\/p>
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, young aristocrats and intellectuals from northern Europe made the Grand Tour: a long journey of formation through Italy, in search of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Verona was one of the first significant stops after crossing the Alps, and almost everyone paused here.<\/p>
What they did was, in essence, a walking tour. They stepped down from their carriages, hired a cicerone \u2014 the local guide of the era \u2014 and walked through the city for days. Their diaries and letters are full of descriptions of Verona experienced on foot: the squares, the Roman monuments, the churches, the markets. Goethe himself, on the same evening that he had visited the Arena, stopped to watch a ball game between Veronese and Vicentine gentlemen nearby, and described it with the same care he had given to the ancient monuments.<\/p>
Those travellers had understood something that is still true: Verona is not a city of individual attractions to tick off a list. It is a continuous experience, built step by step, where every turn can lead to something unexpected.<\/p>
There is an object in Verona that almost no tourist notices, even though they pass within a few centimetres of it. It hangs in the arch that connects Piazza delle Erbe to Piazza dei Signori \u2014 the Arco della Costa, as it is known \u2014 suspended from the vault of the arch itself: a large bone, probably a whale\u2019s rib, that has been hanging there for at least three centuries.<\/p>
The arch was built in the Venetian era to allow magistrates to move between their residence, the Domus Nova, and the Palazzo della Ragione without having to go down into the square and mix with the crowd \u2014 and so avoid the risk of being approached by corruptors or troublemakers. The bone was hung beneath it probably between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most widely accepted theory is that it was an advertising sign for a pharmacy: at the time, people believed that powdered whale bone had medicinal properties. The pharmacy below the arch still exists today. The legend, meanwhile, holds that the bone will fall on the day that an honest and pure-hearted person walks beneath it.<\/p>
This is exactly the kind of detail that only exists on foot, only by looking up at the right moment. From a carriage, from a coach, from a screen it does not exist. It only exists if you walk under it.<\/p>
One of the things that most strikes those who walk through Verona\u2019s historic centre is the continuity between its spaces. Piazza delle Erbe, Piazza dei Signori and the small square of the Arche Scaligere are not three separate places: they are a single system, connected by passages, arches and alleyways, that tells three thousand years of urban history within a few hundred metres.<\/p>
Piazza delle Erbe stands exactly where the Roman forum once was. At the centre, the fountain of Madonna Verona: the statue is a Roman figure from the fourth century, reused in the Middle Ages as a symbol of the city. Around the edges, the Mazzanti houses with their sixteenth-century frescoes, the medieval Torre dei Lamberti, the fourteenth-century Domus Mercatorum, the column with the Venetian Lion of Saint Mark. Each building speaks a different architectural language, yet the square works as a coherent whole.<\/p>
Through the Arco della Costa \u2014 looking up at the bone as you pass \u2014 you enter Piazza dei Signori, more enclosed, almost an open-air room. Here was the centre of Scaligeri power: the palaces where the Della Scala family lived and governed, where Dante was a guest, where the Caf\u00e8 Dante still stands today. A few more steps, and you reach the Arche Scaligere: the Scaligeri monumental tombs in florid Gothic, built in a tiny space adjoining the church of Santa Maria Antica. The private cemetery of an entire dynasty, in the middle of the historic centre, visible simply by walking past.<\/p>
A proper walking tour of Verona does not stop at the central squares. Walking west along the Lungadige, you arrive at Castelvecchio: the Scaligeri medieval fortress, now a museum, with its battlemented bridge over the river. The Ponte Scaligero is one of the few examples in Europe of a perfectly preserved medieval defensive bridge \u2014 to cross it on foot is to walk over the Adige on a structure built in 1354, from which the city looks completely different than it does from the bank.<\/p>
Then there is the church of Sant\u2019Anastasia, Verona\u2019s Gothic masterpiece: the unfinished facade looking out on a quiet square, the two humped figures supporting the holy water stoups inside \u2014 humble, grotesque figures at the entrance to a magnificent space. Details that can only be seen by entering, only by walking in.<\/p>
Every stop on the route adds a layer: Roman, medieval, Scaligeri, Venetian, Risorgimento, contemporary. All visible in the same itinerary, all readable on foot, all connected by streets that in Verona still \u2014 almost miraculously \u2014 maintain the structure of their original layout.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was 16 September 1786 when Johann Wolfgang Goethe arrived in Verona for the first time. The German writer \u2014 thirty-seven years old, already famous across Europe, travelling under a false name to avoid being recognised \u2014 was on his first journey through Italy. The first major city he encountered, coming down from the Brenner Pass, was Verona.<\/p>\n
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: \u2018This amphitheatre is therefore the first remarkable monument of antiquity that I have seen, and in what a state of preservation!\u2019 He had just done what Grand Tour travellers did by definition: he had walked inside history.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10204,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10220,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10210\/revisions\/10220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veronaguide.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}