She lives in a thousand places in Verona—on tote bags, tea towels, in the glow of phone screens held high.
But her official residence, according to Google Maps, is Casa di Giulietta: Verona’s approximation of where Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene could have taken place. Basically, it’s a graffiti-covered courtyard where visitors take pictures with a bronze Juliet statue, cupping her right breast—for “good luck,” they say, though it’s hard to ignore the fact that the literary heroine is supposed to be 13. They also write her letters, dropping them in a red mailbox or smushing them to a wall with wads of chewed gum.
It’s gross, really.
Still, something sincere slips through. The letters are real. People travel from all over the world to scribble down their romantic angst, seal it and send it into the void.
And not far away, in a lamp-lit office at the end of a cobblestone street, the void answers back. I went there in search of Juliet and found six of her instead—women who reply to every letter she receives.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because these women—Juliet’s secretaries—were immortalized in the 2010 film Letters to Juliet, which put a cinematic spin on their longstanding tradition. 15 years later, the club is still thriving. And one balmy afternoon in early summer, they let me join.
A woman named Giovanna greeted me. She had the sun-streaked hair and bronzed skin of someone who’s lived countless Italian summers and the warm demeanor of someone who’s been answering love letters longer than I’ve been alive. She led me through the office, a charming jumble of old theater props and romance ephemera. Tables and shelves were decked with red paper hearts and pink peonies. A mannequin displayed an old theater costume. On one wall, a 1990s Romeo and Juliet opera poster hung above a bookshelf where unanswered letters were stored in boxes divided by language, like a global filing system for heartbreak.
What stood out most was the archive along the back wall: boxes of answered letters labeled by year. Giovanna gestured from one row to the next, like a curator tending a museum of forgotten Valentines.
“We’ve kept every letter we’ve received since 1991,” she explained, though Juliet has been receiving mail for much longer.
In the 1930s, travelers would leave letters at Juliet’s tomb—an empty sarcophagus in a Franciscan monastery. The caretaker of the tomb was “a very eclectic man,” one secretary told me, who began replying to letters and signing them simply: Juliet’s secretary. The tradition was passed down through a chain of custodians: a professor, a city hall employee, and finally to Giovanna’s father, Giulio. He brought together artists, scholars, and fellow Shakespeare fans to reply to letters in what became an informal club of sorts.
Today, the club is indeed formal. A registered nonprofit, Club di Giulietta receives both municipal funding and about 9,000 letters per year. I scanned the shelves of unanswered mail in marked boxes: English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Arabic… how could they possibly answer everybody?
Camilla, a 26-year-old secretary who wrote her master’s thesis on Juliet, explained that while the club is buoyed by a small group of permanent volunteers, it also welcomes visitors from around the world to pen responses in their native languages. “If there’s a language that nobody speaks, that letter stays in the box and hopefully within a year, someone comes who can answer it,” she said.
Soon, it was my turn. Giovanna placed a box labeled English in front of me—housing a clutter of paper, envelopes, and confessions. In loopy teenage script, one girl wrote about waking up at 5 a.m. with panic attacks for a month after her boyfriend cheated on her. On a postcard, a woman revealed that her husband told her he didn’t love her anymore but wanted to stay and try to find their way back.
I was moved by their heartbreak, but even more by the trust they placed in Juliet—a character, a ghost, a complete stranger.
One envelope contained several love letters addressed to a man. I didn’t understand until I got to the last letter: “Cara Giulietta—You can see my feelings through the letters I wrote to him and put here.” They were her old love letters—given back to her after a breakup, now passed on to Juliet. No return address. No expectation of reply.
This isn’t rare, Camilla told me. For many, writing to Juliet is like throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain—an offering in hopes that it will bring luck. (See: “P.S. Also, I would really like that ring so if you could speed it up a bit, I’d appreciate it!”)
“They see her as a saint in a way,” Camilla said.
The cult of Juliet thrives throughout Verona, even for those unfamiliar with her tale. Earlier that morning at Casa di Giulietta, I caught part of a conversation between an Australian couple who believed she truly existed.
“And she jumped off this balcony, right?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” said her partner, nodding confidently.
It doesn’t matter, really. The myth is elastic, but the symbolism—love, tragedy, longing—holds firm. As I pored over sentences like “I’ve never told anyone this” and “Only you would understand,” I couldn’t help but feel as though the fiction doesn’t cheapen the belief, it just gives it shape.
One letter stumped me. A woman described her troubled seven-year relationship and asked whether she should marry her fiancé or leave him, writing: “I didn’t know who else to turn to but you.”
I’m a fraud, I thought.
I’m not a Shakespearean heroine—I’m a 25-year-old writer from New York who once got a tattoo on a first date for no good reason other than it was raining and the tattoo parlor was dry. Letting me play God in other people’s love lives is the epistolary equivalent of putting a man with a podcast in charge of national diplomacy. What a strange responsibility it is to be Juliet. How could anyone be expected to inherit a voice once occupied by history’s most famed playwright?
I was not alone in my doubts. Camilla said she often wrestled with how to reply, recalling one letter from an American woman who was questioning her sexuality, unsure of whether to speak openly about it with her husband or explore it in secret until she was absolutely certain.
“It s hard because you’re embodying this character, who is supposed to be nice and romantic and very caring,” Camilla said, “but at the same time, you have your own opinion on relationships, on life, on everything.”
And sometimes, love stories are larger than the people inside them. Decades of letters spanning the globe have shown the secretaries the ways in which politics and history shape matters of the heart. Giovanna once received a letter from a Swedish journalist in love with an imprisoned Black man in apartheid-era South Africa. And just a few years ago, Camilla read one from a Ukrainian woman separated from her Russian boyfriend by war. It would be too easy—and too wrong—to compare these couples to Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed love isn’t so poetic in real life.
The hardest part of answering letters was not knowing how any of the stories would end. With each response I wrote, I had to accept that I would never know whether I said the right thing, or whether everything would be alright.
Closing my final envelope and stepping back into modern Verona, I saw once again how Juliet had been Disney-fied with trinkets and tours. The balcony was a set piece, the wall scarred with Sharpied-on hearts and bubblegum. Even the secretaries became a plotline, with Letters to Juliet grossing over $80 million. A soft myth, sold hard.
Still, there’s a reason people are drawn to Juliet four centuries after she was first imagined. Behind all the fanfare, she’s a friend and a confidante. A soft place for grief to land. You don’t meet this Juliet by groping her statue and taking photos, but by writing to her. To do so is to step outside of the spectacle. It’s slow. It doesn’t photograph well. You don’t wait in line for it. You sit with it.
Back in the courtyard, I watched a group of girls writing letters together, laughing at first, then settling into silence. One by one, they got up to drop their letters in the red mailbox, until there was one girl left sitting cross-legged on the pavement, studying the scrap of paper while her friends looked up restaurants on their phones. Her letter was a mess of scribbles and erasures. She kept crossing things out and starting over, like she was trying to get it just right.