What the market stalls, the fountain and the frescoed houses of Piazza delle Erbe tell you

The oldest square in town

Piazza delle Erbe is the long market square at the heart of old Verona, and for many visitors it is the picture of the city. Market stalls fill its center, towers rise over the rooftops, and almost every building around the edge carries a date and a story.

It is also the oldest square in Verona. It follows the plan of the Roman forum and served for centuries as the city's political and economic center. The name, the square of herbs, comes from the spices and vegetables once sold here in the Middle Ages, a trade the market still echoes today.

From forum to marketplace

When Verona became a Roman municipium in 49 BC, the forum was laid out where the main north-south and east-west streets crossed, part of the wider grid explored in Roman Verona. A Capitolium temple was completed around 20 BC, and by the end of the first century AD the forum formed a rectangle roughly 168 by 58 meters, framed by deep porticoes.

Centuries later, under the Scaliger lords, the medieval square gained much of the civic furniture visitors still see. Alberto I della Scala rebuilt the merchants' hall in stone in 1301, and Cansignorio della Scala added the fountain in 1368 and a bell-clock tower in 1370, turning a market space into a stage for civic life.

Venice, and after

Verona submitted to Venice in 1405 and, after an interruption, returned to Venetian rule in 1517. A marble column carrying the lion of Saint Mark followed in the early 1520s, with sources giving 1523 or 1524 for its raising. French troops destroyed the lion in 1797, and the figure now on top is a replacement carved by Cesare Poli, put in place in 1886.

The square's darkest day came during the First World War. On 14 November 1915, three aircraft painted black attacked, and the bombs that fell on Piazza delle Erbe left about a hundred casualties. The market came back, as it always had, though over time souvenirs and clothing have joined the fruit and vegetables among the stalls.

The fountain and the Capitello

The statue on the fountain, known as Madonna Verona, is Roman: a female figure that came from the Capitolium and is said to have once been gilded, now read as a personification of the city. She holds a scroll with the old civic motto, calling Verona a bearer of justice and a lover of praise. Cansignorio assembled the fountain in 1368 from Roman pieces, including a large basin from a bath building, to mark the arrival of water in the square from the Lori stream.

Nearby stands the Capitello, a marble canopy also called the Tribuna. It is sometimes called the Berlina, the pillory, a name Italian sources describe as improper; its real role was civic, since newly elected lords and podestà swore loyalty to the city statutes here, and it also served to regulate merchants. Look for the iron standards of old Veronese units of length still fixed to it, remnants of the market rules once enforced on this spot. Its origins are medieval, with a rebuilding under the Scaligers in 1378.

Houses, towers and a palace

The Case Mazzanti, facing both the square and Corso Santa Anastasia, still carry facade frescoes painted by Alberto Cavalli in the first half of the sixteenth century, after Matteo Mazzanti bought the complex in 1517. The Domus Mercatorum, the merchants' hall, keeps its medieval arches on red stone columns, double windows and battlements, and later housed the Chamber of Commerce.

The brick Torre del Gardello is where Cansignorio installed Verona's first public bell clock in 1370. It was raised to 44 meters in 1626, and its original bell, cast by a master named Jacopo and weighing nearly two tons, is now displayed at Castelvecchio. The much taller Torre dei Lamberti rises behind Palazzo della Ragione, and Palazzo Maffei closes one short side of the square with a Baroque front finished in 1668, crowned by a balustrade of six statues of pagan gods.

The bone under the arch

Walk under the Arco della Costa toward Piazza dei Signori and look up: a large curved bone hangs from the vault, probably a whale's rib, recorded there since around the middle of the eighteenth century. In Venetian times the covered passage let magistrates walk from their residence in the Domus Nova to the courts in Palazzo della Ragione without mixing with people in the street who might try to bribe them.

Nobody knows for certain why the bone is there. The most plausible explanation is that an apothecary below used it as a shop sign, since powdered whale bone was once believed to heal. Others have suggested a fossil. Local legend adds that it will fall on the first honest person to walk beneath it, a story visitors still repeat as they pass through.

How to visit

The square is free and open, and a slow circuit takes about half an hour, longer if the plan includes climbing the Torre dei Lamberti nearby. The market stalls occupy the center, the old toloneo, so it is worth walking the edges as well to see the facades and the ground-floor portico of the Case Mazzanti up close.

The square is flat and fully accessible, and it sits between most of the old town's main sights, which makes it a natural starting point for a walk. Combine it with Piazza dei Signori through the arch, Casa di Giulietta nearby, and the Scaliger tombs, and check current details for any indoor sight with the operator before setting out.