How to spot the Roman city gate that Corso Porta Borsari walks straight through

A Roman gate still in use

Porta Borsari stands in the middle of a modern street, and nobody needs a ticket to look at it. It is the surviving outer face of the main gate of Roman Verona, about thirteen meters high and roughly as wide, with two arches that pedestrians and cyclists pass through constantly. After the Arena, it ranks among the best preserved Roman structures in the city, and seeing it costs nothing and takes no planning.

The reason to stop here rather than walk past is that the gate rewards a slow look. The facade carries a dated inscription, the street running through it follows the Roman plan exactly, and the whole structure sits on the line of one of the great roads of northern Italy. It is a natural starting point for anyone building a walk around Roman Verona.

Finding it on Corso Porta Borsari

The gate is not tucked away; it interrupts the street called Corso Porta Borsari, which takes its name directly from it. Approaching from the direction of Piazza Erbe, the corso narrows and the gate appears ahead, framing the view rather than standing beside it. Walking the other way, from outside the old center, the gate is the point where the street becomes noticeably more monumental.

Because it sits in an open street rather than behind railings or a courtyard, it is easy to miss if attention is on shop windows rather than upward. The clearest way to spot it is to look for the two arches rising above the traffic and the band of carved stone running across the top of them. Everything that matters is on that front face, visible from either direction without needing to step off the pavement.

Porta Iovia and the Via Postumia

The first gate on this spot went up in the second half of the first century BC, when Verona was enclosed as a walled Roman town, and it was built of brick. In the first century AD it received the monumental facade of white limestone, quarried in the hills north of the city, that still stands today. An inner courtyard and a second face toward the town once completed the structure; both have long since disappeared.

The Romans knew it as Porta Iovia, named for a small temple of Jupiter nearby. The Via Postumia ran through it and continued inside the walls as the decumanus maximus, the main east–west street of the Roman town, which is why the gate was given such rich decoration: this was the principal entrance, built to impress arriving travelers. A posting station with its own staff operated close by, handling officials and travelers on the road, making this the busiest threshold in Roman Verona as well as its grandest.

Gallienus and the walls of 265

The long inscription running above the two arches is the single most important detail to find, and it dates to AD 265. It names the city Colonia Augusta Verona Nova Gallieniana, credits the order to the emperor Gallienus, and records that the walls of Verona were built starting the third of April and dedicated on the fourth of December of that year. Supervision of the work fell to Aurelius Marcellinus, who held the title dux ducum.

Those seven months amounted to a restoration and expansion of existing defenses rather than a wall raised from nothing. The circuit was extended by about five hundred fifty meters specifically to bring the Arena inside the fortifications, and the builders reused large quantities of salvaged stone to finish quickly. Fragments of this same third-century wall still surface along several streets in the center, for anyone who wants to trace the line further.

Why it is called Borsari

The name in use today is medieval, not Roman. It comes from the bursarii, officials responsible for collecting the duties owed to the bishop on goods carried into and out of the city at this gate. The name attached itself to both the gate and the street behind it, and it has outlasted any memory of the tolls that gave rise to it.

Stone needs maintenance across two thousand years, and this gate has had it. A restoration carried out in the 1970s and 1980s stabilized damaged blocks using epoxy resins and bronze dowels, which is a large part of why the carving on the facade still reads clearly today rather than having crumbled at the edges.

What to look at

Stand back on the outer side, facing the gate from the street beyond it, and read the facade from the ground upward. The two arches are framed by half-columns topped with Corinthian capitals, carrying an entablature and a pediment above them. Two further storeys of arched windows rise over that, six windows in each row, some set into small niches with their own triangular pediments. The whole front was designed as a kind of stage set facing outward, not as a plain defensive wall.

Once the arches and the window tiers have been taken in, look for the inscription on the band directly above the arches and pick out the word Gallieniana within it; finding that one name confirms the date and the emperor behind the work. Walking through the gate itself, Corso Porta Borsari continues straight ahead along the line of the ancient decumanus toward Piazza Erbe, which occupies the site of the Roman forum.

Pairing it with the other Roman remains

Verona's other surviving Roman gate, Porta Leoni, stands on the line of the cardo, the north–south axis that crossed the decumanus at the forum. It too began under the republic and was later faced in white stone, with a square plan, an inner court, and two sixteen-sided towers facing outward toward open country. Only half of its inner facade survives, built into a later house, with foundations now visible below the current street level nearby.

Its ancient name has been lost; an inscription found at the site names four magistrates who paid for the walls, gates and sewers, and is treated as a founding record for Roman Verona. The present name comes from a Roman tomb decorated with lions that once stood close by. The Arco dei Gavi, a first-century arch raised by the Gavia family on the Via Postumia just outside the walls, adds a third stop: dismantled by French engineers in 1805, it was reassembled from its original blocks in 1932 beside Castelvecchio.

None of these three sites requires a ticket or a scheduled visit, which makes them easy to string together on foot. A walk that starts at the Arena, follows the corso out to Porta Borsari, continues to the Arco dei Gavi and Castelvecchio, and finishes with the short crossing to Porta Leoni covers the clearest evidence of the Roman grid that still shapes the old center, and fits comfortably into one of the broader itineraries through the city.