Walking near the gate in Piazza Bra you will notice an inner courtyard with a porch. It houses a Museum founded by Marquis Scipione Maffei in the first half of the 18th century, now called “Maffeian Lapidary Museum” https://museomaffeiano.comune.verona.it/.

Maffei was an important Veronese erudite, scholar of humanities and passionate collector of antiques. He decided to leave his collections to the city of Verona and to create a Museum for their exhibition and conservation. This place became so famous that travellers came to visit it during their Italian Grand Tour.

According to Maffei, inscriptions were “talking antiquities”, direct sources of historical knowledge, fragments of the past capable of narrating the facts directly to scholars without the mediation of paper reproduction or printed transcriptions.

The Lapidary Museum is one of the few Italian museums with a substantial nucleus of Greek inscriptions. Furthermore, it is really rich of pieces from Roman times. Under the porch and in the garden you can find a lot of Latin inscriptions coming from Verona and its province, Istria, Dalmatia, Aquileia, Brescia and other cities in the Veneto region.

The main Liceo Classico (College for Humanistic Studies) in Verona is also dedicated to Scipione Maffei. Many generations of Veronese boys and girls studied in this school, struggling to translate Greek and Latin texts. This institution can boast another title: it was founded in 1807 during Napoleonic Age and it is the most ancient Italian Liceo Classico still in operation. It is now located in the former convent of St. Anastasia church.