Juliets Balcony

Juliet’s Balcony: The Shrine to a Character Who Never Existed

The balcony at Casa di Giulietta on Via Cappello 23 in Verona was added to a medieval house in the 1930s, installed specifically to give visitors somewhere concrete to project their feelings about a play. Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Verona but never visited Italy. The Capulet family is fictional. There was no balcony in the original play text – the word never appears in the script; directors and set designers invented the staging. And yet the courtyard below a house that may once have belonged to a family called Dal Cappello draws enormous daily queues, a bronze Juliet statue with a right breast worn gold from constant touching, and thousands of love notes pressed into the walls each year. The city of Verona employs people whose job is to remove those notes when the accumulation becomes structural.

None of this should put you off going. The collective investment of human belief in a fictional location is genuinely interesting to witness, and the house interior – period furniture, costumes including the one from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film adaptation, and access to the actual balcony – costs only 6 to 8 euros. The courtyard itself is free to enter. On a summer weekend the queue for the balcony moves, but expect 20 to 40 minutes between 11am and 3pm, which are the worst hours. Go before 10am or after 4pm and you will share it with a fraction of the crowd.

The Arena di Verona

The Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra is the third-largest surviving Roman arena in existence, built in the first century AD with a seating capacity of approximately 22,000. It is in remarkably good condition – the outer walls deteriorated from an earthquake in 1183, but the inner structure stands largely as Roman engineers left it. During the day you can visit it as a historical monument for around 10 euros.

The opera season runs from late June through early September and has been doing so continuously since 1913, which makes it one of the longest-running outdoor opera events anywhere in the world. Full productions with international casts perform in open air, the stone seating lit at the start of each evening by thousands of audience members holding candles – one of the more atmospheric pre-performance traditions in classical music. Tickets for the 2026 season ran from around 30 to 250 euros, with Nabucco opening on June 13 and Rigoletto closing in early September. Book early; popular productions sell out months ahead. Bring a cushion for the stone seats, which are genuinely uncomfortable for three-hour performances, and something warm for the late evening – the arena cools quickly after midnight.

Piazza delle Erbe and the Old City

Verona’s old city is built on the original Roman urban grid, with Piazza delle Erbe on the site of the former forum. The surrounding buildings span medieval and Renaissance periods without much gap: the Palazzo della Ragione (city hall from the 12th century), the Torre dei Lamberti (climbable for views, around 5 euros), and the Gardello Tower all face the same square. A morning market runs in the piazza, selling produce and souvenirs.

Ten minutes north, the Roman Theatre sits cut into a hillside above the right bank of the Adige River. It dates from the first century BC and has an archaeological museum in the former convent above it. The view from the theatre back across the river to the city – with the Arena visible in the distance and church towers breaking the skyline – is the best vantage point in Verona that most visitors miss entirely.

Eating in Verona

Verona is in the Veneto, and the local kitchen diverges sharply from the pasta-focused cooking most visitors expect from Italy. Bigoli in salsa – thick pasta with anchovy and onion – is the regional standard. Risotto all’Amarone, cooked with a wine that costs 60 euros a bottle, is indulgent in a way that is hard to justify intellectually but easy to justify at the table. Bollito misto with its various dipping sauces is a long, slow meal that requires an afternoon.

Amarone della Valpolicella is made from partially dried Corvina and Rondinella grapes in the hills west of Verona, aged a minimum of two years, and it is the best wine for understanding why the region matters. A good restaurant bottle runs 40 to 80 euros. Valpolicella Ripasso, made by passing lighter wine over the pressed Amarone grape skins, gives you something of the richness at 15 to 30 euros. The Osteria Sottoriva on the stone-vaulted riverside walkway near Ponte Pietra is the practical choice for lunch.

Getting to Verona

Verona Porta Nuova station sits on the main Milan-Venice rail line: 1.25 hours from Milan, 1.5 from Venice, 1 hour from Bologna. The station is 20 minutes’ walk from the Arena, or 10 minutes by taxi.