Possibly founded by the Veneti, it was of great importance in the Roman Age and became a Roman town in 49 B.C.

In 312 A.D. Pompeianus, General of Maxentius was defeated and killed near Verona by Constantine. It became Christian in the 4th century, till it became the beloved city of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoth kingdom in the middie of the 5th century, then a Longobardic dukedom and the seat of Pipin, King of Italy under the Carolingian Empire.
In the 11th century Verona was joined to the Mark of Bavaria and in 1136 it became a municipality.

The Tomb: in the underground crypt, that is situated in the east wing of the cloister, we find the red marble sepulchre without a cover, where the tradition has always wanted the mortal remains of the young heroine to be located. It is known that in the past the ecclesiastic burial was denied to the homicides and suicides, but referring to Juliet, as the legend wants, the authorities were moved to pity and accepted to give her a simple burial without any kind of heraldic bearings or inscriptions. According to the same tradition of the XVI century, when the fame of the legend increased, the church decided, in order to hide the scandal, to desecrate the tomb, by dispersing the bones and the cover, and converting the grave in a vessel for the water, as Dalla Corte remembers (1592). It became later a destination of various pilgrimages, between which the most important is the one of Maria Luisa of Austria, in 1822, who did not resist to the fascinating idea of possessing a souvenir of the famous sepulchre, and wanted some jewellers to work her a necklace and two earrings with some pieces of stones taken from the grave. George Byron as well couldn’t resist to the temptation of keeping away some little pieces of Juliet’s tomb, to give them as a present to her daughters and grand-daughters. At the beginning of the XIX century, the playwright Augusto of Kotzebue narrates that, in Vienna, the archduke Giovanni showed him, very proud, the cover of the tomb, that he transported himself from Verona.When, in 1842, the ‘franceschine’, left the convent, the tomb had been forgotten. The English writer Charles Dickens, who was became enthusiastic about Verona, during a visit to the sepulchre that he defined as a ‘horse-pond’, got very annoyed because of the total careless of it. Later, with the arrival of the Congregation of Charity in 1868, the grave was put under a portico, together with the ruins of the ancient cloister, in order to protect it. But only in 1898 they tried to find out an ideal settlement, and they changed the whole place when in 1910 a herma to Shakespeare was inaugurated. Only in 1935, when Antonio Avena decided to put in some museum the artistic patrimony of the town, the sepulchre was moved, and it was collocated in an underground crypt next to the cloister, where nowadays still remains a sure destination of the pilgrimages.

Romeo and Juliet in the art: there are lots of artistic evidences dedicated to the Shakespearian drama; as for the painting, the canvas painted by the Venetian Francesco Hayez, the famous ‘Juliet’s funeral’ by Scipione Vannutelli, and ‘The last kiss of the two lovers of Verona’ by Gaetano Previati, are unforgettable. The music and the dance celebrate Romeo and Juliet’s myth thanks to Vincenzo Bellini, Hector Berliotz, Serghej Prokofiev, Leonard Bernstein. In the theatre, we have to remember the first appearance in Verona of a very young Eleonora Duse, as the Shakespearian heroine. The cinema too gives importance to this tragedy, with George Cukor’s masterpiece of 1936, Leonardo Castellini’s film of 1951, and with Franco Zeffirelli’s poetic version. Also two important artists of Verona are to be mentioned: Angelo dall’Oca Bianca, with his paintings, and Berto Barbarani with the poem ‘Romeo and Juliet’, written in the vernacular.

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