The tourist massification leads the city council to prepare the expropriation of the surroundings of the house of the protagonist of the famous work of Shakespeare
The last overcrowding was experienced at Easter, with thousands of people queuing on Carrer Cappello in Verona, from where you access the courtyard where you enter Juliet’s house, whose emblematic balcony is one of the locations where the events take place. Shakespeare in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. With more than 1.6 million tourists traveling to this city in northern Italy each year to follow in the footsteps of the Montagues and the Capulets, there is an urgent need to regulate the flow of visitors to avoid the increasingly common overcrowding. For this reason, the local authorities of Verona are planning to expropriate the buildings around Juliet’s house in order to place turnstiles and collect a ticket giving access to this space. In this way, they want to guarantee a pleasant experience for tourists who gather every day on the patio where the image of Julia is photographed next to her and, many of them, also caress her breast.
“We have been talking about it with the city council for at least two years. It would be a decision that would affect the courtyard and part of the 14th-century building to the left of the current entrance,” explains Vincenzo Tinè, Chief Inspector of Archeology, Landscape and Fine Arts of Verona, Vicenza and Rovigo. the local media.. Due to expropriation, all this touristic area would become municipal property, allowing the area to become a museum, as is now only the case with Julia’s House.In this way, the patio would only be entered after making a reservation and buying a ticket, which Tinè says would end the queues and “eliminate the mass of people who come in just to take a selfie”.
The expropriation project has not pleased the owners of the businesses in the vicinity of the Casa de Julieta that would be affected. There is a souvenir shop, another coin shop, a ‘bed and breakfast’ and the Teatro Nuovo. Zeno Poggi, president of the latter, has made an alternative proposal not to fall into the hands of the city council: to create a cultural route that starts in this interpretive center and ends in the patio from which the balcony of Juliet’s house can be seen. This prevents tourists from having to enter and leave via the same place, as is currently the case. “It’s the only plausible solution,” Poggi says.
Those responsible for Verona’s cultural treasures reject this option as it would confuse the visitor. «The only valid entrance is from Cappello Street, to make people understand that they are arriving at a medieval house. It is necessary to exclude the hypotheses that it is accessible through the theater, which comes from the 19th century, or from a neighboring company from the 50s,” says Tinè. According to him, there is no other solution than expropriation, which is facilitated by the declaration of public interest for the building and the patio. The ball thus remains in the roof of the city council, which must estimate before the start of the procedure the expected means that the owners of the affected companies will present and the foreseeable legal process that will be opened afterwards. A long battle looms over the ownership of this place, where instead what visitors hope to find are the keys to love.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
