Palazzo della Gran Guardia

This guide to the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona follows a covered military hall that Venetian officers commissioned in 1610 so troops could muster and drill out of the rain. It traces architect Domenico Curtoni's arched design, the stone quarried from the Roman Arena across the square, and the four years of work that stalled in 1614, leaving the shell unfinished for two centuries. Austrian soldiers occupying Verona used the half-built hall as a barracks in 1848, decades before it was ever finished.