Porta Borsari Historical Timeline

A Roman city gate standing in the middle of a shopping street, with no ticket, no railing and no opening time. It is the best preserved gate in Verona, and what makes it legible is that it was built twice: once in brick as a working gate, and once in stone as a face for the city to show arrivals.

Chronology

1. 2nd half of the 1st century B.C. Built at the same time as the Roman walls and Porta Leoni, following the romanization of Transpadane Gaul in the spring of 49 B.C. It went up almost entirely in brick — a functional gate, not a monument.
2. 1st half of the 1st century A.D. The gate is caught up in a programme of monumentalization and given stone facades on both the forum and the country sides. The elaborate front a visitor photographs belongs to this second phase, not the first.
3. Middle Ages Its name changes from Porta Iovia to Borsari, after the bursarii — the tax collectors stationed there. It keeps working as a main entrance, though it matters less once the communal and Scaliger walls are built further out.
4. 16th century Renaissance architects including Giovanni Caroto and Andrea Palladio study and draw it. Some of them are critical of it — the gate enters architectural theory as an example to argue about.
5. 1970s–1980s Major restoration, using epoxy resin repairs and lead sheeting to keep water out of the stone.

Only the front is left

A Roman gate of this type was a deep structure: twin passages, flanking towers and an inner courtyard. All of that has gone. What stands is essentially the decorative screen, preserved because later buildings were built against it rather than through it.

The modern road still passes through the openings on the Roman alignment, because Corso Porta Borsari follows the decumanus maximus. The gate did not survive the city; the city kept using the gate.