Discover Castel St Pietro

Castel San Pietro is a panoramic terrace above the Adige, while the imposing building behind it is an Austrian military barracks rather than a castle interior open for regular sightseeing. The hill has held strategic and religious sites since antiquity, giving the viewpoint a much longer history than the nineteenth-century building suggests.

The terrace overlooks Ponte Pietra, the Roman theatre and Verona's historic centre. A stairway climbs from the riverside, while the Castel San Pietro funicular offers a shorter ascent during operating hours.

What stands on the hill is not a castle but a barracks, built by the Austrian army between 1852 and 1858 when Verona was a fortress city of the Habsburg Quadrilatero.

It is accordingly plain and military: a long symmetrical block in stone and render, with regular windows and no ornament, designed to house a garrison rather than to impress anybody.

Fragments of what came before survive around it -- traces of the Visconti castle of 1393, destroyed by Napoleonic troops in 1801, and of the Roman and earlier occupation of the summit.

The terrace in front is the reason to come, and the architecture is essentially a backdrop to it.

A funicular, opened in 2017, climbs from the riverside at Ponte Pietra; the older approach is a long stone stairway up the hillside.

A barracks, built like one. The block on the summit is deliberately plain: a long symmetrical range in stone and render with regularly spaced windows, round-arched in a stripped neo-Romanesque manner. It was put up between 1852 and 1858 as part of the Habsburg fortress system, and everything about it — the proportion, the repetition, the absence of ornament — follows from housing soldiers rather than impressing anyone.

The site did the work. The hill is the defensive asset, and each occupier built to the same logic: command the river bend and the crossing below. The Austrians levelled what earlier fortifications remained rather than adapting them, which is why almost nothing older is visible on the summit despite 2,500 years of continuous use.

Getting people up it. The stair from the riverside is the old route and is direct and steep. The funicular, opened in 2017, cuts into the hillside and does the climb in about a minute — a modern piece of engineering added to a site whose whole military value was that it was hard to reach.

Can I go inside the castle? Not normally. The building is a former Austrian barracks and is not open as a regular sightseeing interior; the terrace in front of it is what is open, and it is free.

Do I have to walk up? No. A funicular runs from the riverside near Ponte Pietra. Check its operating days — it does not run year-round in all conditions — and the stair is always available as the alternative.

Is it worth it at sunset? Yes, and so does everyone else think so. The terrace is at its most crowded then; the view is nearly as good an hour earlier.