House of Juliet
House of Juliet Historical Timeline
Last updated on September 22, 2026A real fourteenth-century house that a city deliberately turned into a literary shrine, and the turning is better documented than anything about Juliet — who is fictional and has no history to have.
Chronology
- The building first appears in documents. It is an ordinary Veronese casa-torre: narrow street frontage, tall and deep plan, courtyard behind — which is what it still is under the staging.
- The city of Verona buys the property. From this point what happens to it is a municipal decision rather than a private one.
- Part of the property is sold off to allow the Teatro Nuovo to be built next door — the same theatre that visitors now enter the house through.
- Antonio Avena, director of the civic museums, completes the house-museum. The balcony is created for it: Avena assembled it from fourteenth-century marble already in the city’s hands — sarcophagus panels that had been lying in the courtyard of Castelvecchio — and set it on the courtyard wall. The stone is genuinely medieval; the balcony is not. It is stagecraft rather than forgery: the courtyard needed a balcony because the play does.
- Nereo Costantini’s bronze Juliet is placed in the courtyard. The statue most visitors photograph is younger than the tourism it serves, and the one standing there now is a copy — the original was moved indoors after decades of being rubbed for luck.
What is genuine here
The house. It is a well-preserved example of how a Veronese merchant family actually lived, with pointed-arch openings and tufa trim, and it is the part most visitors walk past on the way to the balcony.
The association is genuine too, in its way — just younger than it looks. The Cappello family name resembles Capuleti, and the identification grew from that long after Luigi da Porto set his version of the story in Verona. Watching a city build a shrine to a character is a more interesting thing to see here than the character would have been.