Discover House of Juliet

Casa di Giulietta is a medieval building adapted in the twentieth century as a museum devoted to Verona's association with Shakespeare's fictional lovers. It was once connected with the Cappello family, whose name helped later tradition associate the house with the Capulets, but it is not the documented home of a historical Juliet.

The familiar courtyard and balcony are products of the site's modern transformation into a literary attraction. Visitors come for the staged atmosphere, museum displays and the long popular tradition surrounding Romeo and Juliet. The site is best understood as a piece of cultural history: it shows how fiction, tourism and civic identity can create a landmark.

The house is a thirteenth-century Gothic townhouse in brick, of the ordinary Veronese merchant type: a tall narrow front onto the street, a courtyard behind, and pointed-arch openings.

The facade onto the courtyard carries Gothic windows and a doorway with the dal Cappello arms -- a hat, punning on the family name -- which is the one genuinely medieval piece of evidence connecting the building to the story.

The balcony is the famous element and the least authentic one. It was assembled in the 1930s from a fourteenth-century sarcophagus fragment and fixed to the courtyard wall as part of a restoration that deliberately built the legend into the fabric.

Inside, the rooms were fitted out in the same campaign in a Gothic-revival manner, with period furniture brought in rather than original to the house.

In the courtyard stands a bronze Juliet by Nereo Costantini, placed in 1972; the figure now there is a copy, the original having been moved indoors after decades of being touched.

An ordinary Veronese townhouse, which is the point. The structure is a fourteenth-century casa-torre in brick: narrow street frontage, tall and deep plan, courtyard behind, with pointed-arch openings and the tufa trim standard in Verona. Strip away the association and it is a well-preserved example of how a merchant family lived here — which is the part most visitors walk past.

The balcony is 1930s. Antonio Avena added it during the restoration of 1939–1940, assembling it from fourteenth-century marble the city already owned — sarcophagus panels recovered from the courtyard of Castelvecchio. The stone is medieval and the balcony is not, which is a finer distinction than “fake” allows: the courtyard needed a balcony because the play does, and the city supplied one out of its own salvage.

Avena’s restoration is a design, not a repair. Working in the same decades as the great Italian museum reorderings, he reshaped the courtyard, reinstated Gothic openings, and furnished the interior to evoke a fourteenth-century house rather than to document one. The result is a building that is genuinely medieval, genuinely restored, and genuinely staged, all at once.

Did Juliet live here? No. She is a fictional character; there was no historical Juliet. The house belonged to the Cappello family, whose name resembles Capuleti, and the association grew from that.

Is the balcony medieval? The stone is; the balcony is not. Antonio Avena assembled it in 1939–1940 from fourteenth-century sarcophagus panels recovered from Castelvecchio, so it is genuinely medieval marble in an arrangement that never existed before the twentieth century. The house around it is genuinely fourteenth-century.

Can I see the courtyard without a ticket? The courtyard and the museum are managed together and access arrangements changed in 2026; check the official booking page rather than assuming the courtyard is open to walk into.