From literature to trendy Olympics, Italian metropolis welcomes followers to really feel :: WRAL.com

VERONA, ITALY -About a two-hour practice journey from Milan, Verona, the “City of Love,” gave the impression to be the right place for a day journey on Valentine’s Day. It was a bit drizzly, grey within the sky and fully packed within the slender streets surrounding Juliet’s House, however the climate did not do a lot to quiet a crowd that got here right here for love, ritual and a narrative everybody already is aware of by coronary heart.

Visitors of Juliet’s House funneled in shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing towards the well-known balcony and urgent near the bronze statue of Juliet for a photograph, polished in locations from generations of palms looking for “good luck” in love. The partitions across the entrance arc layered with messages: initials, dates, doodles, declarations in each language: sticky notes that seem like tiny vows pinned to stone. It’s messy and nostalgic and unusually charming, like the town collectively determined that being tacky just isn’t solely allowed, however inspired.

None of it’s a confirmed historic hyperlink to William Shakespeare’s Juliet  — and the positioning’s recognition has lengthy outgrown the information  — but that is nearly inappropriate.

Romeo and Juliet was set in “fair Verona,” and that concept nonetheless pulls folks in: the idea that a spot can maintain emotion the way in which a souvenir does, and that love tales could be endlessly held by the ties of a pink padlock offered for 3 euros.

Beyond the romantics bodily visiting Juliet’s House, there arc the hopeless romantics who’ve taken to the native publish workplaces to mail letters. Thousands of messages addressed merely to “Juliet, Verona” arrive from all over the world, asking for recommendation, for consolation, for a blessing on a relationship that feels too fragile to belief to silence. Across from the courtyard, a volunteer group often known as the Secretaries of Juliet reads and responds, retaining this very modem custom alive in essentially the most old style approach doable: one letter at a time.

For Verona, that mix of historic stone and residing emotion is form of the entire identification, and it’s now on full show for the world another way than typical.

The metropolis is ready to host the Olympic Closing Ceremony on Feb. 22, 2026, in addition to the Paralympic Opening Ceremony on March 6, 2026. Both of those ventures will probably be hosted contained in the Arena di Verona, the Roman amphitheater that will probably be remodeled into the “Verona Olympic Arena.”

So on a day devoted to like, surrounded by soaked coats, fogged-up cellphone cameras, and handwritten guarantees caught to a wall, it was laborious to not really feel how Verona docs this higher than most locations: it makes room for spectacle, and for softness, in the identical breath. Today, it was a balcony and a love notice. Next week, it is a stadium-sized goodbye to the Olympic Games and a hey to the Paralympics in a metropolis that understands how a lot folks wish to really feel one thing collectively.