Verona Arena
Arena di Verona
Interesting facts
- In 1278 nearly 200 Cathar heretics captured at Sirmione were burned at the stake inside the Arena on the orders of Alberto I della Scala.
- A city statute of 1276 allowed prostitutes to live only in the Arena's arcades; they were turned out in 1537 and the arcades let to artisans and merchants.
- A gladiator's tombstone found in Verona honours Generosus, a net fighter from the school of Alexandria, who won 27 bouts and died of natural causes.
- Pliny the Younger wrote to a friend who staged games in Verona in memory of his wife, regretting that the African panthers he had bought were held up by storms.
- Medieval chroniclers, unsure who had built it, called the amphitheatre the house of Theodoric, after the Ostrogothic king.
- In 1822, to close the Congress of Verona, Rossini composed and conducted a spectacle called The Holy Alliance in the Arena.
- Goethe visited in 1786, and the Arena was the first great monument of antiquity he saw on his Italian journey.
- After World War II engineer Riccardo Morandi braced the surviving wing by threading steel cables down through holes drilled into its pillars and filling them with cement.
- In January 1751 the Arena showed a live rhinoceros to spectators who could hardly believe such an animal existed.
- Since 1984 a giant steel comet star, 70 metres high, has been raised in the square at Christmas, its long tail for years reaching into the Arena.
Why it is worth it
The Arena rises out of Piazza Bra like a piece of geology rather than architecture: an oval of pinkish-red limestone quarried in the Valpolicella hills north of the city, laid in bands with courses of river pebbles and thin rows of dark red brick. It was finished around AD 30, in the generation after Augustus, and it ranks among the largest amphitheatres the Romans built in Italy. Its arena floor measures some 76 by 44 metres, the whole building about 152 by 123 metres, and in Roman times it held perhaps 30,000 people who came to watch gladiators and hunts.
What visitors see today is really the inner shell. The building once had a taller outer ring of arches, and the earthquake of January 1117 brought most of it down; later builders carted the fallen stone away for other works. A single fragment of that outer skin, known as the Ala ("the wing"), still stands, and it is the most eloquent thing on the site: a sliver showing how much higher and grander the original façade was. Inside, the cavea of stone steps is almost complete, and from its upper rows the view runs across the roofs of the old town toward the hills.
Unlike most Roman amphitheatres, this one never stopped being used. Since 1913, when Verdi's Aida was staged here, the Arena has hosted a summer opera season that has paused only for wars. With a modern stage it seats around 22,000. The building also served as the finishing line for several Giro d'Italia races and, in 2026, as the setting for the closing ceremony of the Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics.
The square in front, Piazza Bra, was remodelled in the 1820s, when its ground level was lowered by about 70 centimetres. It is worth walking the whole circumference before going in: the rhythm of the arches, the weathered stone and the patches of later repair tell the building's two-thousand-year story better than any plaque.
Getting there
The Arena stands in the centre of Verona, on Piazza Bra. The nearest airport is Verona Villafranca "Valerio Catullo" Airport (VRN), about 10 km away. From Verona Porta Nuova railway station it is a walk of roughly 20 minutes straight up Corso Porta Nuova, or two stops by the city buses that run from the station to Piazza Bra.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Verona Arena is a Roman amphitheatre located in the historic center of Verona, Italy. It is among the best-preserved ancient amphitheatres to have survived into the modern era. This remarkable state of preservation is largely due to systematic restoration efforts that began in the 16th century.
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