Castel San Pietro, the balcony on Verona
The hill of San Pietro is a suggestive hill that rises for a few hundred meters behind the Roman Theater. Its top, in an easily defensible position and close to the water of the Adige, has been inhabited since the dawn of time. It houses a nineteenth-century military barracks, built by the Austrians.
In this place traces of a settlement dating back to the Iron Age have been found; here in Roman times a temple and a fort were built to defend the Ponte Marmoreus (Ponte Pietra); in the Middle Ages a castrum and the church of San Pietro; at the end of the fourteenth century an imposing manor, built by the Visconti and reinforced during the Venetian domination. The Visconti castle continued to dominate the hill until March 1801, when the Napoleonic troops strategically blew it up before handing over the city to the Austrians. These, on the remains of the ancient fortress, between 1852 and 1856 built the military barracks that we can still admire today. The construction involved leveling the ground that transformed the top of the hill into a regular platform overlooking the city, on which the rectilinear geometries typical of Austrian imperial architecture rest. However, it was wisely built in such a way as to integrate with the surrounding environment, using what were the typical materials of Veronese architecture and its traditions: stone masonry and brick facings for the vertical structures; brick for the vaults; stone and tuff for the ornamental elements.
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