Where the letters to Juliet go, and who writes the replies

A real house, a borrowed story

Juliet's House, the Casa di Giulietta, is a medieval tower-house in brick at Via Cappello 23, a short walk from Piazza delle Erbe. It is the most visited monument in Verona, and nearly every visitor comes for the same three things: the small courtyard, the stone balcony and the bronze statue of Juliet.

It helps to arrive knowing exactly what the house is. The building is real and old, but its connection to Romeo and Juliet is literary tradition, not a record. No document places a Juliet here, because Juliet is a character in fiction. What visitors see is a genuine medieval house that the city dressed, in the twentieth century, as the setting of the most famous love story set in Verona.

How a hat became the Capulets

The house is first documented in the fourteenth century. It served as an inn called del Cappello and belonged to the heirs of one Antonio Cappello; the family's emblem, a hat, is carved on the keystone of an arch in the courtyard. Cappello means hat in Italian, and the surname sounded close to Capuleti, the Italian name of Juliet's family in the story.

The story itself grew in stages. Dante's Purgatorio names the Montecchi and the Cappelletti as feuding factions. The Renaissance writer Luigi da Porto turned the feud into a tale of two lovers in a novella published in the sixteenth century, and Shakespeare's play followed not long after.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, readers searching Verona for the play's locations matched the Cappello arms to the Capulets and began pointing to this inn as Juliet's home. The identification rests on that resemblance of names and on the pull of the story, not on any evidence that a Juliet ever lived here.

The city's staging

The Comune di Verona bought the building at the start of the twentieth century. At the end of the 1930s, the director of the civic museums, Antonio Avena, turned it into a house museum. Sources differ on exactly when the works finished, placing completion around the end of that decade. Avena mixed neo-medieval decoration with authentic pieces from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries: carved stonework, capitals, fireplaces and furniture.

The balcony belongs to that staging. It was assembled from a fourteenth-century marble piece from the civic collections, which had been lying at the Castelvecchio museum waiting for a new use. It suits the building's age, but it was added some six centuries after the house was first recorded, and nearly three and a half centuries after Shakespeare wrote the play. Anyone who visits Castelvecchio afterward is, in effect, retracing the balcony's earlier life in storage.

The statue, the wall, and the letterbox

The bronze Juliet in the courtyard is by the Veronese sculptor Nereo Costantini, made in the second half of the twentieth century. Visitors took up the habit of touching its right breast for luck in love, and the wear became so severe that in June 2014 the statue was replaced with a copy cast from the original mould. The original figure is kept inside the house, out of reach of hands.

For decades visitors wrote names and promises on the walls of the entrance passage, and later stuck notes on with chewing gum. Since 2019 writing on the walls has been banned, the passage has been cleaned, and signs ask visitors to respect the monument. A letter in the box is the way to leave a message now; a pen on the brickwork is not.

Who writes the replies

Letters addressed to Juliet began arriving in 1937, when a custodian named Ettore Solimani started answering them by hand. What began as one man's kindness to strangers became an institution: the Club di Giulietta, founded in 1972, carries on the work with a group of volunteer women who reply by post in Juliet's name, often to people who never expected an answer.

There is a letterbox at the house itself for anyone who wants to leave a note in person, alongside the postal address the club publishes for letters sent from elsewhere. Each year, around Valentine's Day, the club awards a Cara Giulietta prize to the letters its readers find most striking, chosen from the volume that arrives from around the world. The replies are handwritten, unhurried, and treated as a tradition worth keeping rather than a novelty act for visitors.

What you see inside

Look first at the street front and courtyard: exposed brick, a Gothic doorway and trefoil windows, with a balustrade linking parts of the building. Inside, the rooms follow Avena's arrangement, with fireplaces, period furniture and walls painted in medieval style. The collection includes nineteenth-century paintings and engravings of the story, among them a well-known rendering of Giulietta e Romeo from 1838.

The bedroom, on the second floor of the tower, is reached by way of a balcony over the courtyard and has walls painted with black and white faceted squares. It holds the bed designed for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet film, which had its world premiere in Verona in 1968. Two cases display costumes worn by the leads, beside paintings and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

How to visit

The museum takes about three-quarters of an hour; the courtyard alone, a few minutes. As the city's most visited monument, the courtyard is rarely empty, and a photo without other people in it takes patience. The quieter parts of the day and the months outside the main season make the biggest difference; see when to come. Check the museum's official site for its schedule before planning around it, since arrangements for visiting and for the courtyard can vary.

Access for wheelchair users is limited to the floor with the balcony, according to the tourist board. Signs at the entrance set out the ban on writing on the walls or sticking anything to them, with sanctions for breaking it, so leave messages only in the letterbox.

Juliet's House fits into a short loop of the medieval center. The Scaliger Tombs are a few minutes north, the Torre dei Lamberti is a few minutes away, and Piazza dei Signori lies just beyond it.