The province of Verona claims Cornelius Nepos as one of her sons, though the actual town in which he was born has never been satisfactorily determined. Cornelius Nepos was the contemporary and friend of Catullus, who addressed some of his poems to him, and together they passed most of their lives in Rome, where Cicero formed one of their circle.
Æmilius Macer, a well-known poet and philosopher, the friend of Virgil and of Ovid, was also a Veronese. There is a work in verse “treating of the virtues of herbs and of the qualities and instincts of reptiles and birds,” by one Macer, but opinions are divided as to whether the author hailed from Verona or was another writer of the same name.
During the Augustan age in which the above named
authors lived, Verona also claimed among her citizens the celebrated architect Vitruvius Cerdone; a claim not always, nor very generally, recognised. His statue however stands among those of her greatest men outside the Palazzo del Consiglio, and perpetuates the fame of the man who designed the once glorious Arco de’ Gavi, that arch which formed one of Verona’s greatest monuments up till 1805, when it was wantonly taken down. Other writers who were natives of Verona, or of the surrounding province, were Pomponius Secundus (a writer of tragedies, and who, in his capacity of Veronese consul at Rome, gave a great supper to the Emperor Titus, when according to Pliny who was one of the guests, some wine one hundred and sixty years old was drunk); Cassius or Catius Severus; Pliny the Elder, the famous naturalist whose misplaced zeal led him to meet with his death by too close and too curious an investigation of the eruption of Vesuvius, A.D. 81. Pliny the younger, though born at Como, may almost rank as a Veronese. His mother was the elder Pliny’s sister, his uncle looked upon him and loved him as his own son, and much of his time was spent at or near Verona.
Verona too was early endowed with a University, or as it was termed in those days, a “Cathedral School.” The great impetus given by Charlemagne to public instruction in Italy is one of the traits which redounds most to his honour, and Verona which had always been considered as a spot where learning had met with encouragement, was one of the first towns to profit by the French monarch’s generosity. Indeed it is declared that she has done more for Italy with regard to learning than ever Greece or Athens did. This assertion can easily be believed when we read that only nine years after Charlemagne’s death an Imperial decree ordained that a public school or college should be founded there, a decree that was endorsed by the Emperor Louis XI. in 824. A bull of Pope Benedict XI. in 1339 sanctions this “University,” or more properly, public school, and confirms to it the right of conferring degrees in law, in medicine, and in the arts.
A goodly list could be given of several other writers, many of them bishops and men of saintly lives, whose erudition added to the fame of Verona and spread her renown as a centre of learning into ever-widening circles. Nor were minstrels and troubadours excluded from the list, especially at the beginning of the twelfth century. We read of singers known in the history of minstrelsy, such as Hugues de St Cyr, Pietro Villems, and Sordello, all coming to Verona and finding a welcome there.