What is inside Palazzo Maffei, the museum watching over Piazza delle Erbe

The palace at the end of the square

Stand anywhere in Piazza delle Erbe and look north-west: the long market square ends at a pale, heavily ornamented front with a row of statues along its roof. That is Palazzo Maffei, the one fully baroque building in a square otherwise made of medieval towers and painted Renaissance houses.

It rewards a visitor twice. From outside it is a lesson in how a seventeenth-century banking family advertised itself on the city's main stage. Inside, since 2020, it has been a house museum, where a Veronese collector's paintings, sculpture and objects fill the old reception rooms, and a terrace looks straight down the length of the piazza.

Built over the Roman temple

The palace stands on the site of the Capitolium, the temple complex dedicated to the Capitoline Triad that Roman Verona built when the town became a municipality in 49 BC. According to the museum, the foundations of that complex are still visible beneath the building. The oldest parts of the palace above ground are late medieval, a reminder of how many layers of the city sit stacked on top of each other in this one corner.

The present building belongs to the seventeenth century. Marcantonio Maffei and his nephew Rolandino, both bankers, asked the city council for permission to enlarge their house, and work is dated to have started in December 1626. The ground floor and piano nobile went up before the plague of 1630 halted everything, a pause that left the family's ambitions on hold for decades.

Work resumed after the epidemic, probably from 1663, and an inscription in the courtyard records completion in 1668. The architect is unknown. The scholar Scipione Maffei, from another branch of the family, wrote that the design came from Rome, which fits the family's ties to the papal city and helps explain why the facade feels so unlike anything else on the square.

Reading the facade

The front mixes late Renaissance motifs with baroque ones, and it rewards a slow look rather than a passing glance. At street level, five arches form a false portico with shops, separated by rusticated Doric pilasters. The main floor has five tall door-windows with balustraded balconies, their pediments alternating between curved and triangular, framed by Ionic half-columns carrying carved masks.

Along the roof stand six marble gods: Hercules, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Apollo and Minerva. Look at Hercules, on the left: he is noticeably paler than the rest. The museum says he was carved from a single block of Parian marble found in excavations beneath the palace, and he is believed to be of Roman origin, an unexpected survival sitting above a baroque roofline.

In front of the palace rises the Colonna di San Marco, a marble column set up in 1517 when Verona returned to Venetian rule. Its lion of Saint Mark was destroyed in 1797 under French occupation; the one on top now was made by Cesare Poli and raised in 1886. Standing beside the column gives the clearest angle on both the statues and the facade's rhythm of arches and windows.

The staircase and the roof garden

The palace's most daring piece of building is inside, and easy to miss if a visitor rushes toward the paintings. An elliptical helical staircase in stone winds from the cellars to the roof without a central support, crowned by a lantern and statues. Scipione Maffei described it as standing entirely in the air, and it still looks improbable from below, worth a pause on the way up or down.

At the top, the roof terrace was designed to hold a hanging garden with citrus trees. It was recorded in 1714 in the engraved illustrations of the German naturalist Johann Christoph Volkamer, evidence that the garden was already a notable feature of the house within a few decades of its completion.

Behind the facade, two square courtyards are linked by a passage, and the reception rooms keep stuccoes, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frescoes and a black marble fireplace. These rooms now double as galleries, so the decorated ceilings and the art on the walls compete for attention in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidental.

The Casa Museo and the Carlon collection

The Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo opened in February 2020 to show the collection of Luigi Carlon, a Veronese entrepreneur who spent some fifty years buying art for his own home. The museum concept was developed by Gabriella Belli, and the restoration and fit-out were designed by the studio Baldessari e Baldessari, who had to fit a private collection into rooms that were never built as galleries.

The first stage presented more than three hundred and fifty works, among them nearly two hundred paintings, about twenty sculptures, drawings, furniture, ancient glass, Renaissance ceramics, majolica, silver, ivories and oriental objects. They are hung in eighteen themed rooms in the spirit of a Wunderkammer, deliberately mixing periods rather than following a timeline, so a medieval panel can share a room with a twentieth-century canvas.

The range runs from a medieval work attributed to the Second Master of San Zeno to Lucio Fontana and Marcel Duchamp. A second stage opened in October 2021 on the second floor, adding nine rooms arranged as themed meditations on subjects such as time and metamorphosis, plus a small theater and an art library. Names across the collection include Picasso, Magritte, Kandinsky, Boccioni, de Chirico, Warhol, Burri, Manzoni and Canova, alongside Veronese artists, which makes the museum a far broader survey than its modest entrance suggests.

How to visit

Allow an hour for the museum and terrace at an easy pace, longer if twentieth-century art is a particular interest. The eighteen rooms of the first stage and the nine of the second add up to a substantial visit, and the staircase alone is worth lingering on rather than treating as a corridor between floors.

The facade costs nothing to see: the best view of the statues is from the middle of the square, a little back from the market stalls, where the whole roofline comes into frame at once. Check the museum's official site for its schedule and for occasional closures for private events before planning around it, since a house museum of this kind sometimes hosts events that affect visiting hours.

Booking ahead is worth considering in busier periods, in line with the general advice for Verona's sights. The palace sits inside the city's limited traffic zone, so anyone arriving by car should plan parking outside the old center and walk in, as covered in the city's getting around guidance.

Pairing the museum with the square

The palace sits in the most compact corner of the old town, and several of Verona's best-known sights are within a short walk. The Torre dei Lamberti rises from the other end of the same square, the Roman gate of Porta Borsari is a short walk away, and Juliet's House is a few minutes south-east.

Pairing the museum terrace with the tower gives two very different views of the same square in one morning: one from ground level looking up at the statues, the other from above looking down at the market stalls and the painted facades around them. Either order works, and both are easy to combine with a slower walk through the rest of the old town later in the day.