The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

loody feuds being commonplace (the head of one family invited his enemy
to a truce-making meal, informing him afterwards that he’d just dined off the
liver of his son), there’s no record of these two clans being at loggerheads. The
cheerless facts notwithstanding, a bronze Juliet has been shoved into a corner
of the courtyard, her right breast polished bright by the groping hands of pilgrims
hoping for luck in love. The house itself, constructed at the start of the
fourteenth century, is in a fine state of preservation, but is largely empty.
Verona has a couple of other spurious “Romeo and Juliet” shrines: the
Tomba di Giulietta, in the southwest of the city, in the cloister of the deconsecrated
San Francesco al Corso (Tues–Sun 9am–6.30pm; e3, free on first Sun
of month, joint ticket with the Casa di Giulietta e5); and “Romeo’s house”,
a private dwelling at Via Arche Scaligere 4.
Via Cappello leads into Via Leoni with its Roman gate, the Porta Romana
dei Leoni, and segment of excavated Roman street, exposed 3m below
today’s street level. At the end of Via Leoni and across the road stands the redbrick
church of San Fermo Maggiore (March–Oct Mon–Sat 10am–6pm, Sun
1–6pm; Nov–Feb Tues–Sat 10am–1pm & 1.30–4pm, Sun 1–5pm; e2.50, or
biglietto unico/Verona Card), whose exterior betrays the fact that it consists of
two churches combined. The Benedictines built the original one in the eighth
century, then rebuilt it in the eleventh to honour the relics of Saint Fermo
and Saint Roch (the former supposedly martyred on this site); very soon after,
flooding forced them to superimpose another church for day-to-day use, a
structure greatly altered in the early fourteenth century by the Minorites.
The Gothic upper church may have no outstanding works of art (though the
Annunciation by Pisanello at the west end is the earliest surviving fresco by the
artist), but the numerous fourteenth-century frescoes and the fine wooden
keel vault make for a graceful interior – made in 1314, the ceiling is the oldest
such vault left in the Veneto. The now subterranean Romanesque lower
church, entered from the right transept, has some well-preserved twelfth-century
frescoes on its columns, in particular the Baptism of Jesus halfway down
on the left.
The Porta Borsari and Corso Cavour
After the Arena and the Teatro Romano, Verona’s most impressive Roman
remnant is the Porta Borsari, a structure that was as great an influence
on the city’s Renaissance architects as the amphitheatre. Now reduced to a
monumental screen bestriding the road at the junction of Via Armando Diaz
and Corso Porta Borsari (west of Piazza delle Erbe), it was Verona’s largest
Roman gate; the inscription dates it at 265 AD, but it’s almost certainly older
than that.
Busy Corso Cavour, which stretches away from the gate, is lined with bulky
Renaissance palazzi, including two by Michele Sanmicheli (1484–1559)
– the handsome Palazzo Canossa, at no. 48, and the Palazzo Bevilacqua,
at no. 19. The two could hardly be more different: the former a handsome,
restrainedly classical design with a shallow facade, the latter an ornately
carved Mannerist effort. Sanmicheli, Verona’s most illustrious native architect,
left his mark elsewhere in the city too, most obviously in the shape of the
great fortified gateways of the Porta Nuova and the Porta Palio (both near
the train station), and in the Palazzo Pompei, now the home of the Museo
Storico Naturale.
Opposite the Palazzo Bevilacqua stands the Romanesque San Lorenzo
(March–Oct Mon–Sat 10am–6pm & Sun 1–6pm; Nov–Feb Tues–Sat 10am–
1pm & 1.30–4pm, Sun 1–5pm; e2.50, or biglietto unico/Verona Card), in the
Vicenza, Verona and around
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