Arco dei Gavi

The Arco dei Gavi is a well-preserved Roman honorary arch from the 1st century AD, originally spanning the Via Postumia through the heart of Verona. It was dedicated to the Gavii, a prominent local family, and its piers bear inscriptions naming the architect as Lucius Vitruvius Cerdo — a freed slave, which makes the attribution unusually explicit for an ancient monument. Napoleon's troops dismantled it in 1805 when it obstructed military movement; the arch was carefully reassembled in 1932 at its current location beside Castelvecchio along the Adige riverbank. Today it stands in a small park off Corso Cavour, part of Verona's UNESCO World Heritage old town, and offers a rare ground-level encounter with Roman civic architecture largely intact.