Suddenly, shouts break through the murmuring and clinking of glasses from the aperitivo crowd in the bars on Piazza delle Erbe. A horde of strangely old-fashioned dressed fellows appear in Verona’s old market square, framed by venerable facades. The angry guys are ready to riot – and ready to turn on each other.
It takes a few moments before the people on the piazza realize: it’s not all real, it’s all just a game. They didn’t get into a fight, but became part of the audience of the Teatro Nuovo actors who were presenting “Romeo and Juliet after Shakespeare” as a touring performance without being asked.
With his unhappy lovers, William Shakespeare made Verona the city of eternal but tragic love. This is where his drama “Romeo and Juliet” is set – which brought a rush of visitors to the city that continues to this day.
The fact that the story of the legendary lovers is literary fiction and that attractions such as Julia’s parents’ house or her grave were set up later as a response to the cult surrounding her does not detract from the romance. They fit too well in Verona’s picturesque old town, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.
The Romans left monuments such as the Arco dei Gavi. The Scaligeri, the lords of Verona in the Middle Ages, built the fort with the Scaligero Bridge over the Adige.
The famous Juliet House, also built by the Scaligeri, is a few minutes’ walk from Piazza delle Erbe and is now a paid museum. Before Corona, more than two million visitors a year flocked to the freely accessible courtyard of the Casa di Giulietta, which is staged as Juliet’s parents’ house, to catch a glimpse of the famous balcony on which Juliet in the legendary tragedy in the lovesickness after Romeo languished.
Even if Shakespeare’s literary characters didn’t actually exist, they are real in Verona. This is repeatedly confirmed to 25-year-old Cristina Spagnolo, who works on a voluntary basis as “Julia’s secretary” in the voluntary organization Juliet Club. Because the club based in Vicolo Santa Cecilia receives stacks of love letters from all over the world, sometimes addressed to Julia, sometimes Juliet, sometimes Giulietta.
There are up to ten thousand letters every year. Cristina Spagnolo distributes them in boxes with capital letters painted on them – “A” stands for America, “S” for Spain, and there is also a Germany box. Anyone interested can become a member for a day or longer, and then join Spagnolo and other volunteers in replying to unhappy lovers’ letters.
Like Shakespeare’s drama, written over 400 years ago, the Letters to Juliet are mostly tragic. All too often the senders get rid of their grief. Each letter is answered by hand.
“We respond to the wishes, worries and needs. We don’t judge, we comfort and encourage.” Cristina Spagnolo is blessed with the necessary empathy: When she was four years old, her godmother gave her “Romeo and Juliet”, retold as a picture book for children. She was fascinated: “I must have read it a hundred times and shed hot tears.”
Spagnolo digs out an envelope from the Germany box containing a lined white sheet of paper with a border, written in blue ink, apparently torn from a notebook. “Dear Giulietta,” writes a Nadine from northern Germany, “unfortunately I haven’t had any luck with men so far. In my last three relationships, I’ve been lied to, cheated on, and treated poorly. Now, after almost four years of being single, I’m in the process of getting involved again.”
Club president Giovanna Tamassia has taken a seat next to Cristina Spagnolo. She inherited the post from her late father, who founded the club in 1972.
Giovanna Tamassia, who studied languages, is responsible for mail from Germany. Many of the letters she and the other “secretaries” answered on Julia’s behalf were “sad monologues, like in a diary,” she says. And how does she react to that? How nice it was that she was able to overcome her pain, she replied to Nadine. “At the same time, despite tender feelings, I recommended paying attention to warning signs and being cautious.”
Spagnolo and Tamassia agree: Julia is a projection screen for human ideals and longings, a metaphor for a universal phenomenon called love. It is this desire to love and be loved that makes pilgrimages to Verona, in order to trace love at the supposed scenes of the Romeo and Juliet story, they both say.
It’s about great feelings – not about historical facts. It is therefore irrelevant that neither the Casa di Gilulietta nor the Casa di Romeo or “Juliet’s Tomb” are real.
The actually existing Julia cult is not just an invention of modern tourism strategists – even if they are only too happy to serve the legend in the city in Veneto. Even the English, who traveled through Italy on their Grand Tour with Shakespeare in their luggage, found what they were looking for in Verona.
Poet Lord Byron and writer Charles Dickens are said to have froze when they were shown an ancient coffin in the crypt of a now-defunct monastery, said to contain Juliet’s bones. Heinrich Heine, however, was more skeptical and scoffed that this stone trough was probably a horse trough. A mistake, as we know today. “Juliet’s grave” is a real antique sarcophagus – only her bones are not in it.
Looked at soberly: all fiction, but masterfully condensed into a drama in which the most famous lovers in world literature meet a tragic end in suicide. For Shakespeare made use of existing material; the poet took the names from older models and transferred them to Verona. His main sources were the novella Romeo e Giulietta by Luigi da Porto and Arthur Brooke’s The Tragic History of Romeus and Juliet.
The two feuding families from which Romeo and Juliet came, however, already existed in Dante’s time, long before Shakespeare: the Montecchi and the Capuleti (actually: Cappelletti). Cappello means hat in Italian – the Cappelletti were a clan of hat makers, the Via Cappello their territory.
The monument conservator Antonella Arzone is standing there in the cobbled inner courtyard of the Julia House. The property is just 300 meters from Via Arche Scaligere, where the alleged house of the Montecchi is also located. Arzone points to the stone-carved hat above the passage leading to the courtyard: “The coat of arms of the Cappelletti – in Shakespeare, this became the Capuleti, Juliet’s family.”
The hatters, as the coat of arms proves, actually lived in this building in the Middle Ages. “But the walls are only partially medieval,” says Arzone, pointing to the Venetian arched windows on the second floor and the marble balcony above the entrance, where the iconographic images of Juliet in numerous films were created.
“These elements were transplanted here from demolished palazzi in the 1930s at the instigation of the director of tourism,” says Arzone. The motto was already back then: if you tweak the story, the result should at least look good.
Today the Juliet House belongs to the Museum Association of the City of Verona. A crucifixion fresco from the 15th century is emblazoned on the wall on the upper floor of a side wing. A large hall is adorned with a valuable barrel vaulted ceiling. Another shows Julia’s dress and the bed in which the two lovers sealed their secret marriage – at least according to Franco Zeffirelli, who filmed the story in 1968.
How many people are attracted to these stories is also shown by Julia herself, as a bronze figure next to the entrance. Before that, she stood in the yard for years, where her right breast, groped by millions of hands, had gotten small holes. People believed the ritual would bring a rich blessing of children, says the monument conservator.
The holey Julia was replaced by a copy that also has a bare chest. “On summer days, visitors would back up here before Corona, right up to the street,” says Arzone. And the Julia hype has even more bizarre features. Couples can celebrate their engagement on the Juliet balcony, not exactly cheaply and every ten minutes. Agencies set up weddings at supposed “original locations”.
Hotels offer a “Suite di Giulietta”, at an additional cost, of course. It gets even more expensive if you let yourself be tempted to leave your love messages in the passageway in front of Julia’s house instead of heartbreaking letters. The Monuments Office reacts allergically to such daubing – a fine of 3,000 euros is threatened on a notice.
But preservationist Antonella Arzone also has positive things to say about the Juliet cult: “Thanks to Shakespeare, our city is world-famous.” Visitors who make a pilgrimage to the city in Venetia because of the lovers would discover other treasures. For example the Roman theater at the foot of the San Pietro hill on the Adige river. From the upper tiers, the view of church domes and towers around which the Adige River winds is breathtaking.
Or the old harbor district, a district with low, squatting houses, which can be reached via a marble bridge over the river. Where a canoe club is based today, anchors and iron chains bear witness to Verona’s former importance as a transhipment point on the waterway between the Adriatic and the Alps.
A few steps away from the former port, you will also discover the Casa Shakespeare. A museum awaits behind a weather-beaten wooden portal, where you can interactively experience the history of Verona, but also facts and legends about Shakespeare’s drama.
Incidentally, the angry guys mentioned at the beginning, who stir up the Piazza delle Erbe during their evening performances, mime the servants of the Capuleti clan, who rabble against their opponents from the enemy Montecchi clan. This performance of the drama, in which the city becomes the backdrop, will end at the Teatro Nuovo in Piazza Francesco Viviani, adorned with gold leaf and stucco. Where Romeo and Juliet die in tragedy, only to be reunited in death.
Getting there: The best way is by train, from Munich you can reach Verona without having to change trains by EC or night train (bahn.de; nightjet.com).
Accommodation: “Hotel Verona”, double rooms from 82 euros (hotelverona.it); with a view of Juliet’s balcony: “Suite di Giulietta”, double room from 129 euros (suitedigiulietta.it/en).
More information: casadigiulietta.comune.verona.it; julietclub.com; visitverona.it
It is a popular custom among Munich residents and tourists: anyone looking for happiness in love touches the right breast of the Juliet statue in the city center – but this is now causing a sexism dispute. A city councilor even calls for a male counterpart to compensate.
Source: WORLD / Christina Lewinsky, Kathrin Volpe
This article was first published in January 2022.
