The street leads straight to the Piazza delle Erbe, the vegetable-market (literally, "grass-market"), the forum in ancient times, the most picturesque spot in all Verona, which seems to collect and concentrate in itself all the reminiscences and characteristics of the town. It communicates on one side with the Piazza dei Signori; and the imposing campanile, or bell-tower, of the latter, a shaft of brickwork nearly three hundred feet high, springing above the intervening palace-roofs, makes a companion to the tall, slender clock-tower at the farther end of the Piazza delle Erbe, one of the many munificent gifts of the Della Scala princes. In the centre of the square is a fountain, originally of great antiquity; near by it the market-cross; close to that a marble column on which once stood the lion of St. Mark, set up by the Venetians when they seized the city, and thrown down when the republic of Venice fell in 1799. Not far from these two pillars is a sort of stone dais beneath a stone canopy, which was the very focus of the historic and municipal life of the place in mediaeval days. Here, when Verona was a free city, the _capitano del popolo_ was inaugurated; proclamations were read from it; criminals heard their sentences pronounced from it. Here people who did not pay their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the pavement--_in puris naturalibus_ as to the sitting portion of the person: flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the delinquent convexity.