Casa di Giulietta

Behind the world's most photographed balcony stands a real medieval tower-house that Verona acquired in 1905 and rebuilt into a shrine to Shakespeare's heroine. This guide separates the documented building from the legend and explains what the museum inside actually contains.

Why it matters

Casa di Giulietta is where literary tourism and urban archaeology collide. The house is a genuine medieval structure in the heart of Verona, a tower-residence that the civic museums describe as the home, perhaps from the thirteenth century, of the Dal Cappello family — the clan whose name survives in the street, Via Cappello, and whose emblem is carved on the inner arch of the courtyard. Over that fabric, the city has grafted the fictional Juliet: a commemorative plaque of 1868, a balcony assembled from reclaimed fourteenth-century stone, and a museum opened in 1973. The result is Verona's most visited civic museum, a place that says as much about how cities build myth as about how people lived in the late Middle Ages.

What to notice

Read the building as a casatorre — a tower-house — rising four storeys, actually two adjoining structures probably built at different times and aligned into one front, likely during the fourteenth century. On the courtyard wall, look for the stone hat, the Dal Cappello emblem, and the marble plaque composed in 1868 by the local man of letters Ettore Scipione Righi, declaring these the houses of the Capuleti from which Juliet came. The balcony itself rewards close attention: its central slab is original, cut from soft Avesa stone in the fourteenth century and salvaged from the palaces of the Della Scala lords, then mounted on two moulded corbels in the 1930s with the suspended Gothic tombs of Verona as the model. Inside, the museum rooms unfold through the Sala del Balcone, the ballroom and the bedroom, with medieval-style wall decoration applied during the same restoration.

Context and history

The identification of this tower-house with Juliet's family rests on centuries of literary tradition rather than documentary proof, and the civic museum presents it exactly as that: a theatrical setting for the two lovers' story. The house passed through various owners and was put up for auction in 1905, when the Comune di Verona bought it. Even then it remained tenanted into the early 1930s. The transformation came between 1939 and 1940 under Antonio Avena, director of the civic museums, who rebuilt the courtyard-facing facade, added the balcony and repainted the interiors with medieval ornament, treating the whole as a stage set for the legend. In the early 1970s, under director Licisco Magagnato, the house was reorganised along Avena's vision; the sculptor Nereo Costantini's statue of Juliet took its place in the courtyard, and on 1 June 1973 the Casa di Giulietta opened to the public. It is now part of the I MUV civic museum network.