Casa di Giulietta — Juliet's House — is the 14th-century brick tower house in Verona's historic centre that the world has chosen to associate with Shakespeare's tragedy. The connection is a layered literary fiction stacked on a real medieval building: the original house belonged to the Capello family, whose hat-shaped heraldic emblem (capello means 'hat' in old Italian) was reinterpreted in the 18th and 19th centuries as a link to Shakespeare's Capulet family. The municipality of Verona has owned the building since 1905; in 1939 the architect Antonio Avena added the famous balcony — fashioned from a medieval marble sarcophagus and existing civic stone — to give the courtyard the photographic centerpiece visitors come for.
The interior is preserved as a small museum operated by Musei Civici di Verona. Visitors walk through frescoed medieval rooms, reproductions of Renaissance furniture, costumes from Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet, and historical material on the Capello family. A short stair leads onto the balcony itself — the centerpiece of every Verona honeymoon photograph since the 1940s.
From 1 April 2026 the entry procedure changed: the historic Via Cappello door is closed and all visitors enter through Teatro Nuovo in Piazzetta Navona, a few steps from the original courtyard. Both the courtyard with the bronze Juliet statue and the museum interior now require a ticket — there is no free walk-in to the courtyard. Verona itself was inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage in 2000, recognising the city's exceptional concentration of Roman, medieval, and Renaissance architecture.