Castelvecchio Museum

Listen first to the river. Below the walls, the Adige runs fast and green, pushing hard against the stone piers of the bridge. The bricks around you are warm red, worn smooth at the edges by centuries of hands and weather. Above, the battlements cut a zigzag line against the sky, each one split at the top like a swallow's tail. This is Castelvecchio, the Old Castle of Verona. It was built to keep a ruler safe. Today it keeps paintings, statues and swords, and an unusual piece of twentieth-century design.

The castle belongs to the della Scala family, the lords who ruled Verona in the late Middle Ages. Their name means "of the ladder", and a small ladder appears on their coats of arms across the city. In the mid-fourteenth century, Cangrande the Second ordered this fortress built beside the river. He was not a popular ruler. Many historians read the castle as a defence against his own citizens as much as against foreign armies. The private bridge gave him an escape route across the water, out toward the north and his allies.

Look at that bridge now, the Scaliger Bridge. Its three arches step across the Adige in brick and pale stone. The largest arch is very wide for a medieval span, and it was an engineering feat in its day. Here is the first surprise. Almost everything you see on the bridge is a reconstruction. In April 1945, retreating German troops blew it up. After the war, Veronese engineers and volunteers pulled the original bricks and stones out of the riverbed. They rebuilt the bridge with as much original material as they could recover.

Those split battlements deserve a second look. In medieval Italy, this swallowtail shape was often linked with the Ghibellines, the faction that supported the Holy Roman Emperor against the Pope. Square battlements were linked with the rival Guelphs. The rule was not perfectly strict, but the shapes carried a political message. So the skyline of this castle told every traveller on the river which side the della Scala family stood on. It was a statement written in brick, long before anyone printed a newspaper.

Walk into the main courtyard, and the mood changes. The grass is open and quiet, and the noise of the city drops away. The buildings around you carry several centuries at once. The castle passed to Venice, and much later to Napoleon's French army. The French turned parts of it into barracks and added a long, regular wing in a sober military style. Later still, in the 1920s, the city converted the complex into a museum. Each era left its own layer on the walls.

The most important layer came after the Second World War. Between the late 1950s and the 1970s, the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa redesigned the museum. Scarpa did not try to make the building look old again. He also did not hide the history. Instead, he peeled back some later additions, so that old and new sit side by side and you can tell them apart. Architects from around the world still come here to study his work. For many of them, this museum matters as much as the art inside.

Notice the small details Scarpa placed under your feet and beside your hands. Floors are often set slightly apart from the walls, like a raft floating inside an old room. Steel, concrete, polished plaster and pale local stone meet at sharp, careful joints. Doorways sometimes open in unexpected places, framing a view of the courtyard or the river. Scarpa liked visitors to slow down. He designed routes that turn, rise and dip, so that each object appears at the right moment.

Then comes the second surprise, and it is the heart of the museum. Out in the open air, high on a concrete platform, rides Cangrande the First della Scala. He was the most celebrated of the family, a friend and protector of the poet Dante. This stone statue once stood on top of his tomb in the city centre; a copy stands there today. Look at his face. He is smiling, almost grinning. His helmet hangs on his back, crowned with the head of a dog, a play on his name, which means "Big Dog".

Scarpa spent a long time deciding where to put this horse and rider. In the end he lifted them on a cantilevered platform, so the statue seems to hang in space between buildings. You can see it from many angles: from below in the courtyard, from the walkways, from inside the galleries. The bare concrete and the old brick make a striking contrast. The setting is modern, yet it brings you closer to a medieval face than any museum case could.

Inside the galleries, the collection follows Verona's own story. You will find Romanesque sculpture, meaning the rounded, solid style of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with figures that feel heavy and calm. Further on are frescoes lifted from local churches and painted panels from the Gothic period. The painting rooms include artists such as Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who took his name from this city. Many works were made for Veronese churches and families, so they carry local saints and local landscapes.

The collection has also had a modern drama. One evening in November 2015, armed thieves walked into the museum and took seventeen paintings, including works by Mantegna and Tintoretto. It was one of the most serious art thefts in Italy in recent years. The investigation crossed borders. In 2016, the paintings were found in Ukraine and later returned to Verona. When you stand in front of them, remember that these canvases made a long and dangerous journey before coming home to these walls.

Don't miss the walkways along the top of the walls. Here you can follow the path of the old guards, between the battlements, with the river on one side and the courtyard on the other. The Adige curves away, and the hills rise beyond the rooftops. The weapons and armour rooms also show how seriously this place took its first job. Swords, helmets and shields line the cases. They are a reminder that before it held art, this fortress was built for war.

As you leave, pause once more on the bridge. Feel the slight rise of the brick under your feet. Look back at the castle, where the medieval towers, the French wing and Scarpa's quiet modern touches stand together in one view. The river is still loud below you. Somewhere above the courtyard, Cangrande is still smiling. Take a moment before you walk on — the city around you has kept rebuilding itself from its own stones, much like this bridge.