Corrado is madly in love with Isabella. He declares his love to her in the Verona of the early Sixteenth Century, in a winter so cold it chills the bones.
Isabella, however, gives no sign of reciprocating Corrado’s love. Yet she is more in love than Corrado and all of us can imagine.
Before a well, just steps from Piazza delle Erbe, he shouts in her face how cold she is, like the water that well preserves.
Isabella then challenges him to throw himself into that well.
Corrado accepts the challenge. And he jumps. Until he is swallowed by the ice, the darkness, and the stone.
Isabella, who has lost the beloved she loved more than everything (even herself), throws herself in too.
And thus is born the legend of the Well of Love, which today attracts lovers to the small square next to Porta Borsari, often equipped with a padlock. To mark an indissoluble bond.
It seems like just a great love drama, that of the Well of Love. One of those dramas that populate the legends of times gone by.
Instead, it is a story of life, of energy, and of revelation.
Above all, it is the story of a victory, even before being a love that can move to compassion.
Where is the victory? It’s simple to find. You just need to read between the lines of the legend. And interpret.
Corrado’s brazen declaration of love is, in fact, a will to communicate authentically. On her part, Isabella’s icy armor is instead an inner prison, where she has hidden herself.
And what is the well? Perhaps a place of death?
The Well of Love is the place of authenticity. It is the place of redemption. The place of truth. That is, the denial of the oblivion of incommunicability.
It took me a glimpse of a strange summer – that of 2025, one hundred years after the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby – to arrive at professing my own truth, behind the Veronese legend about Isabella and Corrado’s love.
It took me “the summer of my bewilderment” – with its illusions, falls, recoveries, and illusions – to arrive at the heart of a story that today, more than ever, helps us communicate better.
Let’s start from the beginning. From them. From Isabella, with whom I too have always been desperately in love. And let’s start from Corrado, whose suicidal choice I had never shared, before understanding it in its essence.
All this is dedicated to those who love authentic communication. And to those who love going beyond the veil of appearance.
Verona. The legend of the Well of Love
There are stories that accompany you like silent shadows, ready to emerge when life puts you in front of the questions that matter.
The legend of the Well of Love, that of Corrado and Isabella, is one of these.
It is a story that crosses centuries, remaining unscathed.
Precisely because it is a legend, it lends itself to infinite interpretations: tale of a tragic love, parable about courage and pride. But above all – for those who want to look deeply – it is a powerful metaphor for authentic communication.
I tell that legend of love between Isabella and Corrado in my own way.
For years I have carried it as an example, at the University of Verona where I have been teaching since 2003, of how sometimes nonverbal language is so ambiguous as to transmit contrary meanings, compared to what the communicator would like to transmit. Or compared to what they feel at an inner level.
In early August 2025, reflecting on a series of relationships, I arrived at my own reading of the legend of the Well of Love. And I interwove the threads of tradition with those of my experience.
Because the legend of Verona, like every narrative that touches us, always speaks of us too.
The story of Corrado and Isabella
At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, when Emperor Maximilian held the city of Verona under his dominion, among the guards appointed to imperial service was Corrado di San Bonifazio.
Corrado was a young man of great stature, well proportioned, of joyful and truly noble appearance. He also had the courage of the valiant warrior, who does not stop before the snares of battle.
It happened that one day, Corrado encountered a very attractive gentlewoman, Isabella of the Donati family, who pleased him wonderfully.
She entered his heart so much that it seemed to him he had never seen such a beautiful, nor such a graceful woman.
There was in her – Corrado thought while fantasizing about that love – a warm, loving, and caring heart that no one seemed able to see. Yet, to him, her soul was so clear that he remained dazzled by it.
He adored her way of walking. He was fascinated by her smile and, above all, by her gaze when their eyes met.
Isabella, however, cared little or nothing for Corrado. And nothing mattered to her of the letters or embassies or messengers that the young man sent to her.
It was not the time of smartphones and voice messages via WhatsApp, in that century of bloody wars.
However, thanks to servants, it was not difficult to exchange written messages as if they were today’s text messages.
And in Corrado grew illusions about her love.
The coldness of the beautiful woman
Isabella, however, limited herself to saying that they should all go about their own business; and not bother her.
Many other ways Corrado tried without any luck, even though Isabella’s cold heart nurtured growing love for that valiant warrior.
Corrado found her one day, in the middle of the city, near Piazza delle Erbe, together with other beautiful maidens, in a narrow courtyard just steps from the little church called San Marco ad Carceres.
Corrado began to speak to Isabella, leaning against a graceful and well-decorated well that stood there. He tried in every way to bring Isabella to speak of love with him.
Faced with her detachment, Corrado went so far as to declare how the maiden seemed to him made of ice, certainly as cold as the water that was in the well.
“Well,” the young woman said to him in cruel jest, “try jumping into the well and perhaps you will find yourself colder than ice.”
It was about the middle of February. The cold had reached its greatest force, the north wind was blowing, and the cold was great.
When Corrado heard his cruel Isabella tell him to throw himself into the water, drawn by youthful fury and ill-conceived thought, raising his right hand, he replied: “Here I am, here I am ready to obey you, if I do something pleasing to you by jumping into the well.”
And the fervent lover leaped into the well in one bound; and disappeared there to everyone’s horror.
Isabella, who had so well hidden her love for Corrado, terrified by what she had caused, before the other maidens could stop her, also threw herself into the well.
The sad news soon spread throughout the city. And great horror struck it and provoked tears and anguish in the noblest souls.
There was no one who did not approach that well and did not think of the most powerful love, that love that had led the two most unhappy lovers to too young a death.
And from that time until now, it was called the Well of Love. Thus ends the legend. And thus is born the Well of Love.
The well as a place of authenticity
What is that well really? I have asked myself many times.
Why did Isabella act that way, instead of opening her heart to Corrado? And why didn’t the young man stop to understand her, instead of reading every gesture and every word of hers literally?
What does the well represent in this story? I have repeatedly asked myself, when passing by it.
It’s not just a physical place – I told myself. It must be a powerful symbol: the well is depth, it is mystery, it is the place where you descend to find water – that is, life.
However, the well is also the place where the risk of getting lost is high.
In every well, as in every authentic relationship, the moment arrives when you must decide whether to stay on the surface, safe, or go deep.
Descending into the well means, then, abandoning masks, facing fears, risking putting the most fragile part of oneself on display.
It is there, however, that truth is found. It is there that authentic communication is born: only when we dare to “throw ourselves into the well” can we truly encounter the other.
For me, for example, the well is the metaphor for the summer of my bewilderment: I don’t know what I’ll find down there, but I’ve stopped settling for the surface.
Corrado: from challenge to choice of truth
Many read Corrado’s gesture as an extreme, even mad act: throwing oneself into the well just to prove something to Isabella is not exactly the act of a sane mind, people think.
I see it differently.
Corrado, in my reading, does not kill himself for a challenge, but chooses to go deep, into the truth of what he feels. He stops playing according to the rules of pride and ambiguity.
Isabella’s challenge becomes for him the occasion to abandon every defense: “Here, this is who I am. This is what I feel. It doesn’t matter if you understand me, it doesn’t matter what you think. I choose truth.”
It is an extreme gesture, certainly. But life, sometimes, demands extreme acts of sincerity: with others, but especially with ourselves.
Isabella: from closure to empathetic communication
And Isabella? At first she is closed, entrenched in her position: perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of habit, perhaps because no one ever taught her how to truly love.
Perhaps because the valiant warrior so overturns her vision of the world that she remains terrified by it.
Her challenge to Corrado is a way not to expose herself, to stay safe. But when she sees his courage, when she realizes that true love is recognized only in the moment when it risks everything, Isabella makes the leap.
She abandons entrenchment in herself, stops fearing judgment or vulnerability.
She chooses empathetic communication: she throws herself into the well, not to die, but to finally meet her beloved, not to leave him alone at the most difficult point of the journey.
How many times in our relationships do we stay still on the shore, ready only to judge? How many times does the fear of being misunderstood, of being hurt, keep us away from authenticity?
What this legend teaches us
We live in an era when we communicate continuously, but rarely authentically.
Messages, social media statuses, emojis, stories that scroll and vanish – yet, how rare it is to stop, look the other in the eyes (or even just truly listen to their words), and “descend into the well” together.
The legend of Corrado and Isabella reminds us that true communication is always a risk: the risk of being misunderstood, of not being accepted, of suffering.
As my Philosophy of Science professor would say (University of Padua, 1976), authentic communication is “a blind auction of a gamble”.
However, true communication is also the only way to escape isolation, to overcome the barriers of habit and fear.
When we choose to be authentic, perhaps after years of silences and misunderstandings, we never really know what will happen.
Perhaps the other will reach us in the well, perhaps we will remain alone. But at least, for once, we will have chosen truth.
My bewilderment, my energy
I lived the summer of 2025 as the summer of my bewilderment. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t have all the answers.
However, I have decided to remain faithful to what I feel, to stop writing for someone else, to say what is not true – first of all for myself.
Being a journalist, after all, means telling uncomfortable stories. It means discovering truths that don’t want to be revealed. And it means coming to terms with one’s own way of communicating.
Living bewilderment as energy, on the other hand, means this: – accepting chaos as an opportunity for growth; – letting emotions flow through us, no longer afraid of losing control; – staying present, even when everything seems difficult or confusing.
The well is here, in front of me. I don’t know what’s at the bottom. But I no longer want to settle for staying on the shore.
The courage to throw oneself into the well
The legend of the Well of Love, reread today, is an invitation.
It is an invitation to abandon masks, to let oneself go to the risk of truth, to choose authentic communication even when it scares us.
Corrado and Isabella tell us that there is no love, no friendship, no growth without the courage to “throw oneself”, to let go of pride, to welcome bewilderment as part of life.
Bewilderment and valuable communication
There is another reason why this legend speaks to me so closely.
My life – as a man and as a journalist – has often been crossed by communication made of waiting, of messages left halfway, of silences that weigh heavily.
Words, when they arrive, always seem to brush against truth without ever really touching it.
I too have lived relationships in which ambivalence has often prevailed over authenticity; relationships in which every attempt at communication has crashed against invisible walls:
- the fear of exposing oneself,
- the desire to be understood without making things explicit,
- the hope that the other will take the first step – or at least pick up what one doesn’t have the courage to say
Bewilderment is born precisely here, in the impossibility of a full word, in the alternation between the desire to go deep and the temptation to stay on the surface.
For too long I have written and spoken thinking of who would read, who would perhaps respond, who would catch my signals.
Today it’s no longer like that. Today I recognize that my bewilderment, instead of being a weakness, can become energy: it is the engine that finally pushes me to communicate for myself, without waiting for confirmations from other people anymore.
I reread the legend of Corrado and Isabella; and I realize that I have often remained on the surface, waiting for the other to descend into the well of truth with me.
Perhaps the true gesture of love, toward oneself and toward the other, is thus to throw oneself into the well even alone: because only in this way is the cycle of ambivalence broken; and the possibility of an authentic encounter opens – even if the other doesn’t always follow us.
It’s not easy to say these things. There’s modesty, there’s the fear of seeming weak, there’s the temptation to pretend nothing happened and tell oneself that, in the end, it’s fine like this.
Yet it is precisely in this bewilderment that we can find energy again. Not the energy of waiting and renunciation, but that of awareness.
I reread the legend of the Well of Love and I realize that, for years, I have remained on the threshold: with the desire for the other to understand without having to explain, to gather my need without me having to lay it bare.
Perhaps this is precisely authentic communication: learning to stay in the well, learning to speak in the darkness and in the frost of the cold winter of the sixteenth century, learning to let oneself be bewildered without fear anymore.
Maurizio F. Corte
- Maurizio F. Corte, professional journalist, media writer and media educator, is adjunct professor of Intercultural Communication in Media at the Center for Intercultural Studies of the University of Verona and educational coordinator of the Master in Intercultural Competence and Management.
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