The history of Verona

Garibaldi shouted a vow from a house near Piazza Bra

You are standing near Piazza Bra, Verona's grand open square, where the walls of the old town press close on every side. A short walk east, a plaque marks the house where Giuseppe Garibaldi once stood and shouted a promise to the crowd below: "Rome or death." That was March 8, 1867, and the words are still cut into the stone.

Behind you, a much older warning waits on the city walls themselves: a line from Romeo and Juliet, the play Shakespeare set in this city. It says there is no world outside Verona's walls, only purgatory, torture, and hell. Banishment from Verona, the inscription claims, is banishment from the world itself. Just steps away sits the Museo Lapidario Maffeiano, one of Europe's oldest public museums, packed since the 1700s with Roman inscriptions and carved stone pulled from the ground around you.

Widen your view only slightly and the square fills out. The neoclassical Palazzo Barbieri, now Verona's town hall, rose here between 1836 and 1848 to house Austrian army staff. The bronze rider of Vittorio Emanuele II watches over the piazza from a hundred metres away, and the Colomba d'Oro, a hotel with roots reaching back centuries, stands a hundred and twenty metres to the north.

A plaque honours sons who died fighting in Libya

Forty metres from where you stand, a plaque remembers sons of Verona who died fighting in Libya. It reads simply: to sons heroically fallen. Italy invaded Libya in 1911, fighting the Ottoman Empire for control of the territory. The war dragged on, cost thousands of lives, and the plaque near you is one small trace of it. No names are carved, just a city's grief pressed into stone on a street corner.

The ground under Piazza Bra has seen armies pass more than once. A battle was fought at Verona in 1799, part of the wars that followed the French Revolution. Austrian and Russian forces clashed with the French here, one of many fights for control of northern Italy. The square you're standing near sat inside a city that changed hands again and again during those decades of war.

Allied bombs destroyed Tiepolo frescoes near this square

A short walk northwest, two hundred metres away, stands Palazzo Canossa. Napoleon and a Russian tsar both stayed there. Allied bombing in 1945 destroyed frescoes painted by Tiepolo on its ceiling. Nearby, Palazzo Dalla Torre suffered the same fate: 1945 bombs tore apart a building designed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.

Roman Verona surrounds this spot on every side. The Arco dei Gavi, a private honorary arch built by a noble Roman family, stands about 220 metres away. The Verona Arena, one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere, sits roughly 260 metres off; it still hosts opera every summer. Porta Borsari, an ancient gate on the old road into the city, dates to the 1st century AD and stands under 400 metres from here.

Under 300 metres away, in 1944, a show trial took place. Mussolini's own government put nineteen members of its Fascist council on trial for voting him out of power. Five were shot. The Verona Trial became one of the war's grimmer footnotes, held inside a city already scarred by bombing.

Castelvecchio, the Scaliger family's fortress-castle, rises about 250 metres west. Its bridge, once the longest single-span bridge in the world, still crosses the Adige River nearby. Not far east, the Synagogue of Verona sits close to the site of the city's historic Jewish ghetto, still holding its original furnishings.

Armies and diplomats fought over Verona for centuries

Verona sits on Pliocene clay, laid down between two and five million years ago under a shallow sea. Sand, limestone, and gravel settled alongside it over time. That old seabed now holds up the whole historic centre, including the square under your feet.

Verona's position on the Adige made it worth fighting over for centuries. A siege gripped the city in 541, during wars between Byzantine and Gothic armies over control of Italy. The city's walls, gates, and river crossing made it a prize worth the trouble, again and again.

Centuries later, Verona hosted the Congress of Verona in 1822, a diplomatic meeting of European powers after the Napoleonic Wars. Kings, ministers, and ambassadors gathered here to decide how much freedom the rest of Europe would be allowed. It happened barely 250 metres from this spot.