Verona Beyond Romeo and Juliet: A Literary Walking Tour

Verona has inspired writers, poets, and novelists for centuries – and not just because of Shakespeare. On this walking tour, you'll hear how the city's streets, monuments, and traditions left their mark on literary figures from Dante to Kafka. You'll also discover how Verona shaped works as different as Ezra Pound's Canti Pisani, Camillo Boito's Senso, and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual.

The tour starts at the Arena di Verona, the Roman amphitheatre whose concentric tiers may have inspired the circular structure of Dante's Inferno. From there, you'll pass through the Portoni della Bra gates – where a plaque bears Romeo's anguished words about banishment – and continue along Corso Cavour, the ancient route Dante walked daily during his years of exile in the city. You'll visit the Biblioteca Capitolare, the oldest continuously functioning library in the world, where Petrarca made one of history's most significant manuscript discoveries in 1345.

The route winds through Piazza delle Erbe, past the house where Emilio Salgari was born, and into the squares where Dante's son Pietro settled permanently in 1331. You'll learn how Cangrande della Scala appears in Boccaccio's Decameron and how Caffè Dante earned a place in Julio Cortázar's experimental novel Rayuela alongside the world's most celebrated literary cafés. The tour ends at the Arena, where Goethe marvelled at Verona grandeur and a 35-year-old Pound lingered outside its walls in 1920.

On this 60-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Stand at the Arco dei Gavi, the Roman arch whose bas-reliefs are believed to have inspired carved scenes in Dante's Purgatorio
• Visit the Chiesa di Sant'Elena, where Dante delivered his scientific dissertation Questio de aqua et terra in 1320
• Pass the 12 Apostoli restaurant, a longtime haunt of Hemingway, Pound, and Dalí
• Hear how Kafka smuggled a Verona salami into the plot of his unfinished novel America
• Discover how Camillo Boito's novella Senso describes Verona's rooftops and the Arena through three windows at Castel San Pietro
• Learn why Tim Parks spent an entire football season standing in the Curva Sud with Hellas Verona ultras

This tour reveals a Verona that goes far beyond Romeo and Juliet – a city that has quietly shaped world literature for more than 700 years.