Romeo and Juliet Setting

Verona, Italy

Many of the scenes take place in the streets of Verona, Italy where the young men of the upper-class Capulet and Montague families hang out and get into fights with one another.

Within Verona, Romeo and Juliet have very different worlds. Romeo is always seen in the streets, never in his own house; although, we do hear that he likes to spend a fair amount of time moping in his bedroom or in a sycamore grove when he's crushing on Rosaline at the beginning of the play (1.1.4).

For the most part, Romeo is part of a freewheeling and masculine world. Juliet, in contrast, is very much a sheltered daughter, almost never allowed outside the walls of her father's house. Romeo must invade that world in order to meet Juliet by crashing the Capulet's party and then climbing up to her balcony (1.3).

A neutral place where Romeo and Juliet's worlds overlap is at Friar Laurence's church. This seems to be the only place Juliet is allowed to go outside of her home, (for purposes of confessing sins…presumably not to commit them). Friar Laurence is Romeo's confessor as well. Verona, then, is a setting with a religious – specifically Catholic – dimension.

Theatrical and film interpretations of the play have reset the play in many different cities, from West Side Story's 1950s New York City, which is divided by ethnic tensions, to the futuristic "Verona Beach" of Baz Luhrmann's film version of Romeo + Juliet. What most interpretations keep is the sense of a hot climate that provokes the passions, something Benvolio refers to directly when he says, "For, now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring" (3.1.1).