Discover Corte Sgarzerie Cryptoporticus

A minute from Piazza delle Erbe, under a small courtyard most people walk past, runs a vaulted Roman gallery of the first century BC.

It is a cryptoporticus -- a half-buried arcade whose job was structural. Verona's forum stood on sloping ground, and this gallery was built to carry and level the terrace on which the Capitolium, the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, was raised.

The courtyard above is called Corte Sgarzerie after the wool trade that worked there for centuries, and the loggia over the entrance is named for the mangano, the press that finished the cloth.

Access is irregular, which is the main thing to know.

A cryptoporticus is not a cellar or a crypt, though it looks like both. It is a piece of Roman civil engineering: a covered arcade, partly below grade, used to retain a slope and create a level platform on top of it.

What survives here is a stretch of barrel-vaulted gallery on heavy piers, in brick and local stone, running beneath the courtyard.

The vaults are plain and structural, with no decoration -- this was never a room to be seen, only a means of holding up the temple terrace above it.

Small openings at the upper level admitted light and air, the standard arrangement that distinguishes a cryptoporticus from a true basement.

Above ground, the Loggia del Mangano and the courtyard's arcades are medieval and later, built for the wool trade with no reference to what lay beneath.

A retaining structure that happens to be a room. The gallery is barrel-vaulted on heavy piers, partly below grade, running along the line of the slope. Filling behind it holds the hillside back; the vault carries the terrace above. The usable interior space is a by-product of the engineering, not its purpose — though Romans used such galleries for storage and for shade.

Vaults do the work. A barrel vault converts the load above into outward thrust along its length, which is why the piers are massive and why the structure could support a temple platform without any of the steel a modern retaining wall would use.

Built to be invisible. The masonry is plain and the finish minimal: this was substructure, never intended to be seen, which is exactly why it shows Roman construction more honestly than a faced monument does.

The temple is gone and its foundation is not. That is the usual pattern — the marble above ground was quarried away, and the unglamorous structure below survived because nobody wanted it.

What is a cryptoporticus? A covered, partly buried arcade used to retain a slope and create a level platform on top. It is civil engineering, not a religious or funerary space, despite the name sounding like one.

Is the Capitolium still there? No. The temple above is entirely gone; what survives is the structure that held up its terrace.

How do I get in? Through the Corte Sgarzerie courtyard off the street. Opening is limited and not continuous, so check before making a special trip.