Italy · Old Town
Verona
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Verona is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Arena di Verona 1,500 points
It stands in the largest square in town, and the square is its front hall. Walk the whole way round the outside first, for nothing, with a palm flat against the wall. Then take the Liston, the wide paved strip along the edge, which this city has walked up and down after lunch since 1770. From April there is scaffolding inside for something. I am not telling you what.
Casa di Giulietta 500 points
An arch on the street, a short passage, and then a yard that is open at all hours and costs nothing. Ignore whatever the cameras are all pointed at and look at the arch you came in under. A coat of arms is cut into it, and the charge on the shield is a hat. That is where the street's name comes from and, if you believe the story, a rather more famous surname too. Come at seven in the morning. The stone is the same and nobody is standing on it.
Castelvecchio 500 points
The west end of the level, where the town stops and the water starts. It was not always the old one: it only picked up that name after two newer castles went up, and before that it was called San Martino in Aquaro. It is a museum now, and the best part of it is not indoors. The route takes you up onto the walls and along the top of them.
Cattedrale di Santa Maria Matricolare 500 points
Do not stop at the front door. This yard holds more than you expect, and next to it sits a library that was already in use long before anyone thought of putting any of this up. Charlemagne's son studied in it. So did Dante. It is the oldest working library anywhere, it came through an earthquake, Napoleon and a flood, and it is still lending.
Piazza delle Erbe 500 points
A long thin square with the market down the middle and four different centuries facing each other across it. Walk to the arch at the north end and look straight up before you step under. Something is hanging up there. It has been for about three hundred years, nobody agrees what it is, and one story says it will drop on the first honest person to pass beneath it.
Arche Scaligere 250 points
A walled corner the size of a small garden, wedged between two lanes, and you can see all of it from the pavement without paying anybody. Come at it from Via Arche Scaligere rather than from the square. The lane is narrow enough that you look up into the thing rather than at it.
Castel San Pietro 250 points
The top of the hill, and the last climb of the day. Two ways up: the Scalone, which is a long flight of steps and is what legs are for, or the funicular, which is not. Look closely at the battlements when you get there. They were added to soften a plainly military design, and they are copied off much older walls. A lot of effort to look like something you are not.
Chiesa di San Fermo Maggiore 250 points
At the south end, where Stradone San Fermo runs down towards the river. From the lane it looks like one church. It is two, stacked: there is a second one underneath with four aisles, which is rare, and the stair down to it is the reason to go in. Then look up. The wooden ceiling is shaped like the inside of a hull and carries 416 painted heads.
Chiesa di Sant'Anastasia 250 points
The biggest brick box in the Old Town, at the top of Corso Sant'Anastasia. Stand out front and look up at the facade: the bottom half is dressed and the top half is bare, because the brick facing was left off and nobody came back for it. Inside, twelve white marble columns hold the lot up. A face that stopped when the money did, and it has not pretended otherwise since.
Porta Borsari 250 points
You do not visit this one, you walk through it, and most people manage that without ever looking up. Stand under the arches and read the wall: there is a long Latin inscription across the front of it, and ordinary houses grafted onto the back where the rest of the gate used to be.
Porta Leoni 250 points
Half of it is set into the side of a house, and the rest is in a hole in the pavement out front. Lean on the railing and look down: one of the tower bases is left open to the sky, sitting at the level the street ran at back then, a good drop below the level you are on. This town has spent two millennia raising its own floor.
Teatro Romano 250 points
Cross Ponte Pietra and it is cut into the hillside on the far bank, open to the sky. The complex stepped up the slope in terraces, sixty metres from the riverbank to the top. Stand on the semicircle of the orchestra and look at the trench in front of it: the fittings for raising and lowering the curtain are still down there. Then take the steps up through the rows rather than the shortcut.
Name origin
Why it is called Verona.
Nobody has proved this one. The oldest proposal is Etruscan, and every linguist since has called it plausible: the ending is the ending of Cortona, and behind it stands an Etruscan woman's name, Verunia, with the Latin family name Veronius alongside it. Strabo, writing in Greek, put the place down as a masculine, Ouerhon. One linguist goes further and links the name to verone, the Italian word for a terrace, because the first town sat on a natural terrace above the plain. He then notes that what this city is now famous for is a balcony, and that this is pure coincidence. I have been chewing on that name for a long while. It still gives up nothing.
Sources: www.pittau.it
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at the level on the map. The Adige comes down out of the mountains, turns hard, and hands you a peninsula. Everything you walk here is inside that turn. Verona sits where the plain ends, at the foot of the Lessini hills and close to the mouth of the Adige valley, so it works as three towns at once: a plain town, a valley-mouth town and a hill town. The first settlement was up on the hill on the far bank, and it only came down into the bend once there was a bridge. Fast water on three sides and a hill watching the fourth. Somebody was paying attention.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.visitverona.it
Why then
When the first stone went down.
There is no founding date. The reference of record says plainly that nothing is known about it, and that history and legend are both silent. Even the first inhabitants are argued over: Cenomani Gauls, or Raeti, or Euganei, with the modern reading a Celtic core carrying Raetic and Euganean additions. The first hard dates are paperwork. In 89 BC a Roman law handed the towns beyond the Po Latin rights, and in 49 BC a grant of Caesar's made the Veronese full citizens, filed under the tribus Poblilia. A city whose birthday is a filing date.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 50–489
Rome. The Roman town filled the whole peninsula inside the bend, with two marble bridges over to the citadel on the hill. In the 3rd century Gallienus settled a military colony here and the place picked up a second name, Verona Nova Gallieniana. The era closes in 489 with Theodoric, who kept a palace here and used the city as his window on the north. German legend later named him after the town: Dietrich von Bern, and Bern is Verona.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1136–1262
The commune. Two groups with every reason to dislike each other, the feudal families and the rich merchants, found it easier to run the town together, and consuls appear in 1136. A podestà follows in 1169, and after 1197 that office is permanent. The first written statute is compiled in 1228. In 1262 the city elects a Captain of the People for one year at a time. Electing somebody annually is the method by which you stop one family keeping the place. It did not work.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1262–1387
The della Scala. What started as a one-year office turned into a family, and Alberto pressed the authority of a signoria onto the communal forms slowly enough that nobody can name the day it happened. Under Cangrande the state expanded hard, and for a moment Verona looked like the capital of something large. A coalition of Venice, Florence and Milan ended that between 1336 and 1339 and left the city exhausted. Cut back to Verona and Vicenza, the lords gave up grand politics and spent the money on the town instead. Most of what you will stop and stare at on this walk dates from after they lost.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.visitverona.it
- 1405–1797
Venice. The eighteen years before were a scramble: Milan swallowed the Scaligeri state in 1387, Milan itself fell apart in 1403, and after a short restoration and a shorter signoria Verona simply handed itself to Venice in 1405. Two Venetian governors ran it from then on, with a council of twelve and fifty, and after 1572 the Senate narrowed that council down to a handful of families. Nearly four centuries, broken once by eight years of imperial occupation. The old wool trade faded and silk took its place. Quiet, and a long slow shrinking.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1814–1866
Austria. The years before it are worth one sentence: the French came in 1796, the Austrians took over in 1798, and from 1801 the border between two states ran down the middle of the river you are walking beside. Austrian troops entered on 4 February 1814 and left on 16 October 1866. In those years they renewed the Venetian walls and threw a second ring of forts around the outside, and in the autumn of 1822 the powers of Europe held a congress here. Fortress and conference venue at once, and neither of those is a meal.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1866–
Italy. The change that mattered most after 1866 was not a government but a permission. The military servitude that had been sitting on the suburbs was lifted, and the city could finally build outwards. Two thousand years of being told where its edge was, and then it was allowed to spread. I am still getting used to it.
Sources: www.treccani.it
The emblem
What the shield means.
The city's real arms are a gold cross on a blue field. Shrink that to the size of a thumbnail and you have a plus sign. So the icon is the ring instead. Its outside is rough-cut limestone from the Valpolicella hills, one single architectural order repeated the whole way round, and the Romans deliberately built it outside the city wall so that the crowd would not jam the lanes. No ancient amphitheatre anywhere has survived better. The arms are the younger of the two: gold on blue arrives around the middle of the 13th century, when the free commune dropped an older white cross on red and took up the banner of the city's guilds instead.
Sources: it.wikipedia.org, www.visitverona.it
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Two of the lines in this level are Roman surveying. Corso Porta Borsari and Corso Sant'Anastasia, which carries on from it, were the decumanus maximus. Via Leoni, Via Cappello and Via Sant'Egidio, with shorter pieces in between, were the cardo maximus. The Romans laid the town out on a strict grid inside the bend, and those two lines are still exactly where they put them. Twenty centuries, and nobody has moved a kerb. I have a lot of respect for that sort of stubbornness.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.visitverona.it
This town used to open straight onto its river. Houses stood with vaulted passages at the waterline, and around seventy vo', alleys that were mostly steps, dropped from the streets down to the Adige, with boatyards, workshops and floating mills strung along it. The river also came over 43 times in the 16th century and 59 times in the 17th. On 17 September 1882 more than two thirds of Verona went under, and the answer was to put the Adige in a channel and bury its side branches. That is why the vo' you walk now stop dead at a parapet, and why nothing here smells of flour any more.
Sources: www.dcuci.univr.it, www.visitverona.it
Verona kept outgrowing its own wall. The Romans drew the first ring and left it there. Around the middle of the 12th century the commune pushed the town south, digging a canal and raising the walls that still show themselves along via Pallone. After 1530 Michele Sanmicheli rebuilt nearly the whole circuit and hung famous gates on it. Then the masterpiece turned into the problem: the fortifications sat around the city as a heavy belt and choked off any growth until the start of the 20th century. Four hundred years spent building a fence, and a hundred more wishing it stood somewhere else.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- via
- The plain word for a street, and most of this level is made of them. Via Cappello, Via Leoni, Via Sottoriva, Via Sole. Italian does not decorate the label.
- vicolo
- An alley, and there are forty of them here. Vicolo Balena, Vicolo Botte, Vicolo Morette, Vicolo Due Stelle. A vicoletto is a vicolo that gave up: Vicoletto Gatto, Vicoletto Due Mori. My favourite width, both of them.
- cieco
- Blind. A dozen streets here carry it, and every one is a dead end: Vicolo Cieco Pomodoro, Vicolo Cieco Fontane, Vicoletto Cieco Padovano. In is fine. Out is the same way.
- vo'
- A way down to the river, usually a flight of steps. Vo' Adige, Vo' San Gaetano, Vo' Sole. There used to be about seventy of these and they were how the town reached the water. These three are what is left.
- volto
- A vaulted passage running under a building, and still counted as a street. Volto Barbaro, Volto Fontane, Scalone Volto San Bartolomeo. A street with a roof on it. I approve.
- lungadige
- Along the Adige. Lungadige Panvinio, Lungadige Riva Battello, Lungadige Bartolomeo Rubele, Lungadige Tullio Donatelli. Four long ones, and all four sit on top of the wall that put a stop to the floods.
- corte
- A courtyard that counts as a street, and a corticella is the small version. Corte Sgarzarie, Corte Melone, Corticella Leoni, Cortile del Mercato Vecchio. You walk in, you stand there looking at four walls, and you walk back out. Dots the whole way in and the whole way back.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 242streets
- 1,810dots
- 27.4km of street
- 34.9km on foot
- 10.0hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.