Loggia del Consiglio

Loggia del Consiglio, the white marble civic hall in Verona's Piazza dei Signori, carries the name of a friar and architect who may never have designed it. The guide follows the carved figure of a monk on its corner, long read as a self-portrait, and how that image helped attach a famous name to a building raised for the city council between 1476 and 1493. It traces what nineteenth-century scholars went looking for when they tried to confirm the story, and looks up at the five marble statues of Verona's ancient writers standing along the roofline. The city, it turns out, told itself a story worth questioning.