Scavi Scaligeri Site Features

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.

The Roman mosaics

Pavement fragments from ordinary houses, seen from walkways directly above them.

The stratigraphy

Roman street level below, medieval foundations cut down into it, the modern city overhead -- the clearest cross-section of Verona's growth anywhere in the city.

Photography among the ruins

The Centro Internazionale di Fotografia stages exhibitions in the excavation, which is either the site's best feature or its oddest, depending on your view.

The location

Directly beneath the Scaliger palace courtyard, a minute from Piazza dei Signori and the Arche Scaligere.