Arena Di Verona

The Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra was built around 30 CE and seats 14,000 people. Every June through August, a professional opera company stages Verdi, Puccini, and Bellini in it under the stars to audiences of that size, most of them sitting on the original stone bleachers for two-and-a-half hours. The sight of 14,000 candles lit at the start of an evening performance is one of the more specific experiences available in European cultural life.

The Arena

The exterior ring of the amphitheatre was damaged by a 12th-century earthquake, leaving only four arches of the original outer arcade standing; the structure you see today is mostly the inner ring, which survived nearly intact. The arena is better preserved than the Colosseum in Rome, though smaller, and has the advantage of being genuinely operational.

Daytime visits (museum admission around EUR 10) allow you to walk the full circuit of seating, examine the underground galleries where gladiators and animals were held, and understand the engineering of Roman entertainment infrastructure. The inner wall shows multiple periods of repair from Roman to medieval to modern.

The Opera Festival

The opera season runs June through August; performances begin at 9pm when the summer heat has eased. Aida is the opera most associated with Verona, partly because its Egyptian staging suits the ancient space, but the programme rotates. Check the Arena di Verona Foundation website for the current season; some productions sell out months ahead.

Seating is on the original stone steps (cushion rental available, worth it for anything over two hours), or in covered chairs in the lower sections at higher prices. Going to the stone steps with a cushion, a bottle of wine, and a candle is the authentic Arena experience and my strong recommendation over the more comfortable allocated seating.

Verona Beyond the Arena

The Arena dominates the piazza, but the old city has more. The Castelvecchio on the river is a 14th-century Scaligeri castle now housing an art museum with a collection spanning medieval to Renaissance; Carlo Scarpa’s 1960s renovation of the museum interior is itself worth seeing.

The house marketed as Juliet’s Casa di Giulietta is a 13th-century building used as a touristic backdrop; it has no genuine Shakespearean connection (Romeo and Juliet is fictional) and the famous balcony was installed by the city in the 1930s. It remains perpetually crowded. Skip it and spend the time at the Scaligeri tombs nearby, which are genuinely impressive Gothic funerary monuments.

Piazza Erbe is the medieval market square with a Roman column at its centre. Surrounded by frescoed buildings and outdoor cafes, it is the most pleasant place to sit in Verona. Do it in the morning before the tour groups arrive.

Where to Eat

Verona’s regional speciality is a pasta called bigoli served in a duck ragu sauce; any competent trattoria in the old town does it. The simple white wine called Soave comes from a hilltop town 20 kilometres east and pairs well with the local fish preparations. Trattoria al Pompiere near the Arena is reliably good without being exceptional; worth knowing for a post-opera dinner.