Porta Leoni

This guide to Porta Leoni in Verona follows two building crews separated by a century. In the late first century BC, magistrates named Valerius, Caecilius, Servilius and Cornelius paid for a squat, working gatehouse of brick and rough tufa, checking every cart onto the city's main street, while the masons who actually built it went unnamed. A hundred years later a second crew arrived with orders to dress the plain brick in gleaming white stone, carving a builder's gate into a showpiece. Look down past the modern pavement for the buried remains of that first, unnamed effort.