Piazza delle Erbe

This guide to Piazza delle Erbe in Verona follows the chain-hung stone pillory called the berlina at the center of what was, by the twelve hundreds, the city's regulated trading floor, built directly over the old Roman forum. It traces the exact measures carved into the stone, a roof tile, a brick, a rod's length, that kept merchants honest, and the public punishments waiting for those who cheated. Along the way it takes in the spices, wool and grain that moved through here daily, and the marble fountain Cansignorio della Scala added to the square in 1368.