Porta Borsari

Is it worth the trip?

Not on its own, and it does not need to be. It is a free, always-open stop on any walk through Verona: about 300 m from Piazza delle Erbe and about 400 m from both the Arena and the Arco dei Gavi. Ten minutes is enough to look at both faces and find the inscription. Verona keeps the fronts of two Roman gates, and this is the one that still stands to its full height; at Porta Leoni, 500 m away, half of one front survives against a later building. The Verona page covers the Arena, the theatre and the rest of the Roman town.

Getting there and what it costs

The gate stands where Corso Porta Borsari meets Corso Cavour and Via Diaz, in the historic centre. It is free and can be seen at any hour: it is an open street monument with no ticket (ArcheoVeneto, read 20 October 2026). The bus stop Via Diaz / Porta Borsari is about 30 m away, and there is no car park of its own; the underground car parks near the Arena, listed on the Verona page, are the nearest (OpenStreetMap).

History

The gate was built with Verona’s Roman walls in the second half of the 1st century BC, when the town was moved into the bend of the Adige, and it was the principal entrance to the city: the Via Postumia came through it and ran on as the decumanus maximus, the main street, to the forum (it.wikipedia; de.wikipedia). The first gate was of brick, with two tall towers on the country side (it.wikipedia). Its Roman name was Porta Iovia, after a temple of Jupiter just outside it (ArcheoVeneto); de.wikipedia says the name was learned only in 1986, from a votive altar found during restoration work in the church of San Procolo. The temple was demolished in 1932 (OpenStreetMap).

The stone facade was added in the middle decades of the 1st century AD, when Verona’s public buildings were given monumental dress (ArcheoVeneto; it.wikipedia); de.wikipedia dates it to AD 44, under Claudius. Gallienus’s inscription of 265 replaced an earlier one that had been carefully removed; excavation has shown that his work on the walls mostly repaired and strengthened them, the one new stretch being the circuit taken round the Arena (de.wikipedia). At the end of the 5th century, under Theodoric, a second and higher wall was built 8 to 10 m in front of the first, with a forework before this gate whose remains were first uncovered in excavations in the late 1990s (de.wikipedia).

In the early Middle Ages it was called Porta San Zeno. It still worked as a gate in the 10th century, when it appears with its towers on the view of the city known as the Iconografia rateriana, and it served as a customs post, first recorded in 1007 (de.wikipedia). Its present name comes from the bursarii who collected the dues (ArcheoVeneto; de.wikipedia). Renaissance architects and artists studied it, among them Giovanni Caroto and Andrea Palladio, though Sebastiano Serlio called it barbaric and left it out of his work (de.wikipedia; it.wikipedia). The brick foundations of the town-side front were found in 1860 during sewer works, about 18 m behind the facade (de.wikipedia). The facade was restored in the 1970s and 1980s, when damaged stones were fixed and its exposed surfaces covered with lead; in 1981–1982 the last letters of the inscription, hidden until then by the wall of the neighbouring building, were uncovered and its text could be completed (it.wikipedia; de.wikipedia).