Two thousand years of market
The Roman forum still selling fruit โ continuity without equal.
Didier Descouens โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Gianfranco z โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Falk2 โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Falk2 โ CC BY-SA 4.0
A real whale rib hung under the arch by some merchant centuries ago โ likely advertising exotic Eastern goods โ and legend says it will fall on the first entirely honest soul to pass beneath: it has not fallen yet, popes and kings included, and Verona enjoys the inference.
Leave the square's tables to the scene and slip into the lanes: arcaded Via Sottoriva with its ancient osterie, or the alleys past the cathedral โ Verona's rule: every fifty metres from the square improves the plate and lightens the bill.
Erbe for life, market and clamour; Signori beyond the arch for state, marble and gravity โ Dante standing centre amid the palaces of rule. One visit inevitably threads both, and comparing them is Verona's first pleasure.
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Piazza delle Erbe is Verona's Roman forum that never stopped working โ two thousand years as the city's market, council and heart, from Rome to this afternoon: the vendors' umbrellas in the middle as ever, life circling the Madonna Verona fountain, whose torso is a genuine fourth-century Roman statue re-crowned in the Middle Ages. Around it the city reads in layers: the Lamberti tower soaring; palaces with painted fresco fronts โ the Mazzanti houses survive from when all Verona was "the painted city"; Baroque Palazzo Maffei with its rooftop gods; and the Venetian lion of St Mark on its column, witness to centuries under Venice. It is Verona's living room: morning coffee beneath the umbrellas, an evening drink in its cafรฉ ring, and dozens of crossings between โ every route in the city passes here.
The Roman forum still selling fruit โ continuity without equal.
Relics of the painted city on the Mazzanti houses.
Roman of body, medieval of crown โ the city's fittest emblem.
Piazza delle Erbe, 37121 Verona