Juliet's Balcony
— the balcony the letters keep finding.
Not only on a wall.
“A small stone balcony above a narrow courtyard off Via Cappello, in the part of old Verona that once belonged to the Cappello family, the name Shakespeare adapted to Capulet. The balcony itself is a twentieth-century addition, set into a thirteenth-century wall. A bronze Juliet stands below. The walls of the entry passage carry letters and notes, fixed and unfixed. The Club di Giulietta still answers the letters that arrive addressed to her. People come for the story; the story keeps gathering around the stone.
Juliet's Balcony, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Casa di Giulietta sits at Via Cappello 23 in the historic centre of Verona, an old city on the Adige river in the Veneto region of northern Italy, roughly 120 kilometres west of Venice and 160 kilometres east of Milan. The thirteenth-century house belonged to the Dal Cappello family for centuries; the surname's similarity to Shakespeare's Capulets is what fixed the building to the play. Verona's historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000 for its preserved Roman, medieval, and Renaissance layers, including the Arena di Verona a few minutes' walk to the west. The balcony is two minutes from Piazza delle Erbe and the river.
The balcony itself is a twentieth-century invention. The house is medieval, with most sources placing it in the thirteenth century, but the small marble balcony projecting into the courtyard was assembled in 1936 by the Verona civic museum from an old sarcophagus, set into a wall that already existed. The architect was Antonio Avena. The work belongs to a programme of romantic restoration the city undertook in the 1930s, when it began promoting Verona as the city of Romeo and Juliet. The bronze statue of Juliet in the courtyard, by Nereo Costantini, was placed in 1972 and replaced with a copy in 2014 after decades of visitors rubbing the right breast for luck wore the original through.
The courtyard is open to the street and free to enter; only the museum interior, the rooms of the house set with period furniture and pieces from the 1968 Zeffirelli film, requires a ticket, with an adult fare around 6 euros. Standard hours are 09:00 to 19:00, Tuesday through Sunday, with the courtyard accessible most other hours. The site is heavily visited, and the courtyard is small; the wait to stand directly under the balcony can be long in summer. Letters left for Juliet are collected and answered by the Club di Giulietta, a volunteer group founded in 1972 that has replied to correspondence from more than a hundred countries.