A closer look
Verona’s incredibly popular Casa di Giulietta features a famous balcony where tourists flock to recite Shakespearean lines, despite the fact that Juliet is a fictional character and the balcony was added to the building in the twentieth century. Millions of desperate romantics travel to this specific Italian courtyard to rub the right breast of a bronze statue for good luck, resulting in the metal becoming worn down by the awkward groping of countless strangers. The walls are plastered with thousands of chewing gum wads and desperate love letters, turning a supposedly romantic literary shrine into a bizarre monument to mild vandalism and poor hygiene. You are basically fighting massive crowds of weeping teenagers to photograph an architectural feature bolted onto a random medieval inn specifically to milk money out of literature nerds. Nothing screams eternal romance like participating in public statue molestation
