Verona

What is there today

The Arena and the south of the old town. The amphitheatre stands on Piazza Bra, outside the walls of the Roman town (Musei Civici). Published dates for it run from about AD 30 (Pleiades; it.wikipedia) to the middle of the 1st century (the city’s museums). It held about 30,000 spectators in Roman times; today’s summer performances seat 22,000 (Musei Civici; it.wikipedia). Systematic restoration since the 16th century is largely what kept it in such condition (en.wikipedia), but what you see from the square is the inner ring: of the outer ring, the original facade, only a four-arched stretch called the Ala still stands. The ring was partly pulled down under Theodoric (493–526) to build the city’s second wall, and the Arena served as a quarry until the Renaissance (Musei Civici; it.wikipedia). The whole building measured about 152 by 123 m; without its outer ring it is about 138 by 110 m today (it.wikipedia; hr.wikipedia; fr.wikipedia). The tiers of seats inside have been rebuilt (Musei Civici). Opera seasons have been held here since 1913, interrupted only by wars (en.wikipedia).

A few minutes away are two sites that show the town’s defences. In Via San Cosimo, under the courtyard of the religious institute of the Figlie di Gesù, an excavation shows a stretch of the late-Republican wall of the second half of the 1st century BC, the base of a tower probably added under Gallienus, two rooms of a 1st-century house with mosaic and marble floors, and, about 8 m outside the first wall, a stretch of the second wall built under Theodoric, preserved up to about 10 m high and built partly of blocks taken from the Arena’s outer ring (it.wikipedia). Near by, in the basement of the Banca Popolare di Verona’s headquarters, the house in Piazza Nogara, built at the end of the 1st century BC, keeps mosaic floors laid between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, displayed in a setting designed by Carlo Scarpa (it.wikipedia). At Porta Leoni, a gate built with the walls in the second half of the 1st century BC and refaced in stone in the 1st century AD, half of the stone front on the town side still stands against a later building, and the foundations of the gate can be seen below the street (it.wikipedia; en.wikipedia). An inscription over its central pier, naming the four magistrates who built the walls, gates, towers and sewers, is regarded as the founding record of Roman Verona (it.wikipedia).

The forum and the western gate. Piazza delle Erbe occupies the site of the Roman forum, an open square 168 m long and 56 m wide (it.wikipedia). The Capitolium, the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on its north-east side, was completed around 20 BC; nothing of it stands above ground, but part of the vaulted gallery (cryptoporticus) that ran beneath its portico can be visited under the loggia of Corte Sgarzerie, and more of it lies under Palazzo Maffei and the church of San Benedetto al Monte (it.wikipedia). Remains of the Curia, the council house, can be seen inside the Dodici Apostoli restaurant (it.wikipedia). From the forum, Corso Porta Borsari follows the main Roman street to Porta Borsari, the Porta Iovia of the Romans and the town’s principal entrance, where the Via Postumia came in: only its outer front survives, a facade about 13 m high in white stone from the first half of the 1st century AD, with two arches below and two storeys of windows above (it.wikipedia). The temple of Jupiter Lustralis that gave the gate its name was excavated beside it in 1930 and demolished in 1932, and the stones of its podium were partly reassembled in the gardens outside Porta Vittoria (it.wikipedia; OpenStreetMap). About 400 m beyond the gate, beside the castle of Castelvecchio, stands the Arco dei Gavi, an arch built for the family of the Gavii at the end of Augustus’s reign or early in Tiberius’s, a very rare privately funded arch, signed by its architect, the freedman Lucio Vitruvio Cerdone (it.wikipedia). French military engineers took it down in 1805, and it was reassembled here in 1932, its missing attic redesigned from Palladio’s drawings and earlier surveys; a marble rectangle in the road in front of the castle marks where it stood (it.wikipedia). Digging round it in 2011–2013 found a 2nd-century house whose mosaic floor is now in the Museo di Castelvecchio, within sight of the arch (it.wikipedia).

Across the river. The Ponte Pietra is the only Roman bridge left in Verona (it.wikipedia), completed around 100 BC (en.wikipedia). Its two arches on the left bank are Roman work, in large blocks of stone; the arch on the town side was rebuilt in 1298 and the two middle arches in 1520–1521 (it.wikipedia). Retreating German troops blew it up on 24 April 1945, leaving only the town-side arch standing, and it was rebuilt in 1957–1959, largely from stones recovered from the river, so the Roman arches seen today were reassembled, largely from their original blocks (it.wikipedia). Beside the bridge, the Roman Theatre was built at the end of the 1st century BC against the Colle San Pietro, with terraces rising up the hill to a temple at the top (Musei Civici). Houses and churches covered it from at least the 10th century; the merchant Andrea Monga bought the site and excavated it between 1834 and 1844, and the city took over in 1904 (Musei Civici; it.wikipedia). Its seating was largely relaid or rebuilt in the early 20th century and the stage building survives only to a modest height (Musei Civici; it.wikipedia). The archaeological museum, in the 15th-century convent above the seating, is part of the same visit (it.wikipedia), and a funicular runs from near the bridge up to Castel San Pietro (en.wikipedia; OpenStreetMap).

Valdonega. On the hillside about 1.5 km north of Piazza delle Erbe, a 1st-century villa found in 1957 while a block of flats was being built keeps three rooms on an L-shaped portico; the largest, a dining room with columns on three sides, has mosaic floors and was painted with a garden (it.wikipedia).