Soon after the Palazzo Gazzalo, which boasted a fine garden now only kept as a nursery garden, is the old church of the Cappucines, with traces here and there of Roman masonry. It is now given up to the manufacture of torpedo boats. A few paces further on (going always towards the town) we come to a large enclosure where a horse fair is held twice a year, and where a brisk trade is done in that line, horses to the number of about a thousand coming from Italy, Hungary and other countries to be bought and sold. Through this modern commercial part of Verona we pass to the garden of the Orfanotrofio, where the made-up tomb of Romeo and Juliet has been placed. The tomb is of red Verona marble, but before it was put to this use it served as a washing-trough. A feeling of pity and disdain cannot but be felt over the fraud here practised to arouse false sentimentality. The story of the two lovers, as is well known, had no foundation, and was taken by Shakespeare from one of the tales of Luigi di Porto, a novelist of the sixteenth century. The enmity between the two houses of Montagu and Capulet was indeed a fact historically true, and a fact also whose effect made itself felt in the civil wars and dissensions that had so often disturbed the internal life of Verona. This enmity has also been noticed by Dante, who speaks of it in the _Purg._ vi. 107. But the very silence maintained by the great Tuscan over the story of the lovers is proof enough that so touching a romance had no foundation. Had there been one we may be sure that the master-hand at whose touch Paolo and Francesca have been endowed with immortal fame, and who in six short lines has sketched for us the tragedy of _La Pia_, would not have left “unwept, unhonoured and unsung” the memory of the lovers of Verona. Romeo and Juliet lived only in the imagination of our great dramatist, who has bestowed on them a fame and immortality which they could never have gained for themselves, and which has endeared them to every heart. The bridge called “Rofiolo” leads into the wide Via Pallone, and close beside it is to be seen a tablet with some heads carved on it in high relief. The story of this tablet and of the strange name of “Rofiolo” has been explained as follows: some “guilty sons” (_rei figli_, hence _rofiolo_) murdered their parents and threw them into the canal which flows hard by. The name of these “guilty sons” has consequently been affixed to the spot where their iniquity was perpetrated, and their effigies have been placed near at hand. Such at least is the tradition, into whose absolute veracity it were perhaps well not to inquire too closely.