Discover Piazza delle Erbe

A long, irregular square, narrow at one end and widening at the other, closed on every side by façades from different centuries. Market stalls run down the middle under white awnings. The Madonna Verona fountain stands at the centre, and the column of the Lion of St Mark rises near the northern end.

The square is long and narrow because it follows the shape of the Roman forum beneath it, and its buildings are a cross-section of every period Verona has had since.

Casa Mazzanti carries sixteenth-century frescoes across its front -- the best surviving example in the square of the painted facades that once made Verona known as urbs picta, the painted city.

Palazzo Maffei, of 1668, closes the north end: a Baroque front with a balustrade carrying statues of six gods, and the most theatrical building here.

The Torre del Gardello beside it is fourteenth-century, and the Torre dei Lamberti rises behind the eastern side.

Two free-standing monuments mark the square's civic functions: the Colonna di San Marco of 1523, carrying the Venetian lion, and the Berlina, the canopied tribune where officials were installed and where public punishments were carried out.

At the centre is the Madonna Verona fountain of 1368.

The shape is Roman and the buildings are not. The square keeps the elongated proportion of the forum that lies beneath it, because medieval Verona built against the edges of the open space rather than into it. Nothing here was planned as a composition; the outline is an inheritance and the frontages are infill.

Brick, render and paint. Verona had no good building stone, so the façades are brick, finished with render and then frescoed — painting was the cheap way to get the effect of carved decoration. Casa Mazzanti’s sixteenth-century figures are the best surviving example; most of the square was once treated this way and the weather took the rest.

The monuments are dated by what they assert. The fountain at the centre reuses a Roman statue on a fourteenth-century basin, set up by the commune. The column carrying the lion of Saint Mark is Venetian and says so. The Gardello tower’s clock, and the Baroque Palazzo Maffei closing the north end, mark the two later regimes. Each one is a government announcing itself in the same space as the last.

Is there anything to pay for? No. The square is public space and open at all hours; only the market stalls and cafés have their own hours.

Is the statue on the fountain Roman? The figure is — it was reused in the fourteenth century on a medieval basin, which is why the proportions of statue and fountain do not quite match.

Where are the frescoes? Casa Mazzanti, on the long west side. They read best from the opposite side of the square, not from directly beneath.