Discover Scavi Scaligeri

Beneath the courtyard of the law courts, a few steps from Piazza dei Signori, lies an excavated slice of Verona going down through the medieval city to the Roman one.

It was found during building works in the 1980s and left open. Roman houses, mosaic floors, streets and drains sit below later Scaliger foundations, all under a modern roof.

Unusually, the space is used rather than merely displayed: it houses the city's international photography centre, and exhibitions are hung among the ruins. That makes it worth checking what is on -- and means opening follows the exhibition calendar rather than a museum's.

What you walk through is a stratigraphic section of the city rather than a single building.

At the lowest level are Roman remains: house walls, mosaic pavements, a stretch of paved street and the drainage that ran beneath it.

Above and cutting into them are medieval foundations, including Scaliger-period work from the palaces that stand at ground level today -- the later city literally resting on the earlier one.

The modern intervention is deliberately light: raised walkways carry visitors over the archaeology, with the exhibition hung on free-standing structures so nothing is fixed to the ruins.

The whole is roofed and climate-controlled, which is what allows photographs to be shown there at all.

You are reading a section, not a building. The lowest level is Roman: house walls, mosaic pavements, a stretch of paved street and the drain that ran beneath it. Above and cutting into them are medieval foundations that were driven down without regard for what was there. Nothing here was designed to be seen together; the relationship is the exhibit.

Roman domestic construction, up close. The walls are rubble and mortar faced with brick, the floors are mosaic on a prepared bedding of successive layers, and the street drain is a built channel with cover slabs. This is the ordinary technique behind the monumental facing seen at Porta Borsari.

The city rose several metres. The distance between the Roman surface and the modern courtyard above is the accumulated debris of two thousand years — collapse, levelling and rebuilding. That vertical gap is the single most legible fact on the site.

Conserved in place under a modern roof. The excavation was stabilised and covered rather than lifted, which is why the mosaics sit at their own level and the walkways are raised above them.

What am I actually looking at? Ordinary Roman city — houses, a street and drains — with medieval foundations cut through them, all below the modern ground level.

Is it accessible? It is reached by stairs down from the courtyard and crossed on raised walkways. Check with the operator if steps are a problem.

How long does it take? Half an hour is enough unless you are reading every panel; it is one continuous space rather than a circuit of rooms.