Juliet’s Tomb and the G.B. Cavalcaselle Frescoes Museum

In Luigi da Porto’s Romeo e Giulietta, published in 1530, the cemetery of the Church of San Francesco al Corso in Verona was indicated as Giulietta’s burial place. The church, founded by the Friars Minor in 1230, was rebuilt in the seventeenth century. One tradition identifies the tomb as a medieval sarcophagus re-used in the sixteenth century as a fountain basin. At the close of the sixteenth century, when William Shakespeare wrote his theatrical version of the Romeo and Juliet story, the tomb was already closely associated with this famous love. From the eighteenth century on, a visit there was de rigueur for northern European travellers passing through Verona, and this tradition has continued in the age of mass tourism. In 1970, as an added attraction to Juliet’s final resting place, it was also decided that the site should host, in the rooms of this former convent, a museum, named after Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897), a pioneer in the fields of art history and modern restoration theories. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was thought that the best way to safeguard frescoes was to detach them from the walls on which they were painted. These and other works have been added to the museum collection, which was completed in 2015. Here, the beauty of the paintings testifies to the fame of Verona as an urbs picta: a city much admired by travellers for the colourful frescoes on the façades of various buildings.