In the middle of a shopping street, between one window display and the next, stands a Roman gate thirteen metres high under which people still walk as they did two thousand years ago. Porta Borsari was the main entrance to Roman Verona: here the via Postumia came into the city and became the decumanus maximus. What you see today is the front facing the countryside, rebuilt in the white stone of Valpantena in the first half of the first century to impress those arriving; the city side vanished long ago. It is a stage flat with no theatre behind it, and it is real.
What to see
The façade is an exercise in shadow: two arches at ground level, framed by half-columns with Corinthian capitals carrying a pediment, and above them two storeys with six windows each, all set within aediculae and slender columns. On the second storey the entablature juts out and recedes deliberately out of step with the order below, so that the afternoon light never finds a flat surface. Look at the base: the arches stood on a high plinth, now buried, and the Roman ground level lies a couple of metres beneath your shoes.
Along the attic runs an inscription recording the rebuilding of the walls under the emperor Gallienus, in 265, with the exact dates of the work: barely eight months, from the start of spring to the beginning of winter. In antiquity the gate was called Iovia, after the temple of Jupiter that stood beside it; the present name comes from the bursarii, the officers who in the Middle Ages collected the tolls on goods here. In the Renaissance it was drawn by Giovanni Caroto and Andrea Palladio; Sebastiano Serlio, on the other hand, did not judge it worth including in his treatise, and he was wrong.
Visiting
It is on corso Porta Borsari, five minutes on foot from piazza Erbe along the street that was the decumanus; it can always be seen, there is no ticket and no opening time, and you cross it simply by walking. Ten minutes away is Porta Leoni, the city's other Roman gate, with a twin history. Watch the traffic: the street is narrow and not always closed to cars.
Our editors' tip
Come before nine in the morning, when the shop shutters are still down and the street is empty: it is the only moment when you can stand in the middle of the road, twenty metres back, and see the whole gate with no heads in front of it. Then walk under it and turn round: on the other side there is nothing, only rough wall. That was where the marble front was joined to the old brick gate.