Juliet's balconi

Juliet's balcony, which Shakespeare does not mention, but says that Juliet looked out of a window, appears in the story by Luigi da Porto (Historia, 1524) later taken up by Matteo Bandello (Novelle, 1554), the Bard's probable Italian source. A balcony was thus added at some point to the probable Capulet house. It was Antonio Avena, in 1937, then director of the Civic Museums, who, in order to follow up the myth, recovered the walls of a sarcophagus lying forgotten in the courtyard of Castelvecchio, and had the balcony built. The idea came to him while he was accompanying George Cukor's set designers on a visit to the city to design the scenery that they then reconstructed in the studio, in Hollywood, for the Metro Goldwin Mayer film colossal (1936) that was a worldwide success. The places in Verona involved in the story (the house, the church, the sepulchre) had already been visited by illustrious pilgrims of Romanticism, but Juliet's balcony was perhaps the first example of invention and physical reconstruction of a timeless myth, a fictitious place to make the fortune of a real city. Today, Juliet's house, Verona's second attraction, is a worldwide phenomenon: it has thousands of visitors and receives thousands of letters (where those who suffer for love write a message of their own) answered by dozens of volunteers (the Juliet Club) and has a 'Dear Juliet' award that each year tells of the most beautiful letters. An American film by Garit Winick (2010): Letters to Juliet. Find out more at the link.