Verona Porta Nuova railway station

Verona Porta Nuova
The station and bus terminus (before 2015)
Location	Piazzale 25 Aprile, 6 37138 Verona Verona (VR), Veneto Italy
Coordinates	45°25′45″N 10°58′56″E / 45.429167°N 10.982222°E / 45.429167; 10.982222Coordinates: 45°25′45″N 10°58′56″E / 45.429167°N 10.982222°E / 45.429167; 10.982222
Owned by	Rete Ferroviaria Italiana
Operated by	Grandi Stazioni
Line(s)	Milan–Venice Verona–Bologna Verona–Innsbruck Verona–Mantua–Modena Verona–Legnago–Rovigo
Train operators	Trenitalia Thello Trenord NTV-Italo ÖBB-DB
Connections	Urban, interurban and airport buses
History
Opened	1851
Location
Verona Porta Nuova Location within Northern Italy

Verona Porta Nuova is the main railway station of Verona. It is one of the two stations serving central Verona; the other station, Verona Porta Vescovo, is located at the east of the city.

It is situated at Piazzale XXV Aprile ("25 April") at the south of the city centre. The station is a 25-minute walk or 10-minute bus ride from Arena di Verona. The station was opened in 1852 by the Austrian Empire's Südbahn and, after its transfer to Italy, has substantially been rebuilt between 1910 and 1922. Following the destruction by allied bombings during the Second World War, the present building was reconstructed between 1946 and 1949.

Verona Porta Nuova is a major cross-junction station in Italy: the north-south Brenner Railway connecting Austria and Bologna meets the east-west Milan-Venice railway. The north-south route has been classified by the European Union as Trans-European Network (TEN) Axis No. 1 Berlin-Palermo. The station handles 25 million passengers annually.

The first train to arrive at Verona Porta Nuova was driven by the locomotive Verona on the newly-built railway from Venice which crossed River Adige (River Etsch).

The initial station building was a temporary wooden structure; it was replaced in 1852 by a small masonry building. The masonry, however, had an odd shape: a part of its front had eight arched openings, which went further forward than the other part with only three.

Upon its opening, Verona Porta Nuova was less important than Porta Vescovo, which was located near a major Austrian military camp. At that time, Verona, called Bern-im-Wälsch, was one of the Austrian Empire's main military strongholds with a capacity of 120,000 troops. The Porta Nuova station was initially used only by the two of the three classes of passenger trains then in the region: "omnibus" and "mixed" trains. It did not handle the fastest, most expensive "direct" trains or offer any baggage service.

In 1853, a single-track line became operational from Verona to Porto Mantovano (Mantua). In the same year, the Austrian Empire began construction of the Brenner Railway over the Brenner Pass at 1,371 m, connecting County of Tyrol and Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. The Brenner Railway was among Austria's first trans-alpine heavy railways along with the now defunct Franzensfeste-Marburg Railway (Fortezza in Italy and Maribor in Slovenia).