<P> Even Capulet tries to encourage Paris to wait a little longer before even thinking of marrying his daughter, feeling that she is still too young; "She hath not seen the change of fourteen years, Let two more summers wither in their pride, Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride". However, in the English poem the story is based from (Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke) Juliet is approaching her sixteenth birthday and Romeo is the same age whereas in the Bandello novella she is nearly eighteen with Romeo about twenty . The common English people of that age were very rarely in their teens when they married and even among the nobility and gentry of the age, brides thirteen years of age were rare, at about one in one thousand brides; in that era, the vast majority of English brides were at least nineteen years of age when they first married, most commonly at about 23 years, and most English noblewomen were at least sixteen when they married . That the parts of young women were played by pre-adolescent boys in Shakespeare's day also cannot be overlooked and it is possible that Shakespeare had the physique of a young boy in mind during composition, in addition to the fact that Romeo and Juliet are of wealthy families and would be more likely to marry earlier than commoners . At the time, English noblewomen married on average at 19--21 years (compared to 24--26 years for English noblemen) while the average marriage age in England was 25--26 years for women and 27--28 for men; Sir Thomas More wrote in his Utopia that, in Utopia, women must be at least 18 years of age when they marry and men at least 22 years . </P> <P> The common belief in Elizabethan England was that motherhood before 16 was dangerous; popular manuals of health, as well as observations of married life, led Elizabethans to believe that early marriage and its consummation permanently damaged a young woman's health, impaired a young man's physical and mental development, and produced sickly or stunted children . Therefore, 18 came to be considered the earliest reasonable age for motherhood and 20 and 30 the ideal ages for women and men, respectively, to marry . Shakespeare might also have reduced Juliet's age from sixteen to fourteen to demonstrate the dangers of marriage at too young of an age; that Shakespeare himself married Anne Hathaway when he was just eighteen might hold some significance . </P> <P> In Verona, an early 14th - century house at Via Cappello no . 23, claiming to be the Capulets' has been turned into a tourist attraction but it is mostly empty . The real second name was in Italian Cappelletti, a noble family, and not Capuleti . Cappelletti were in the past members of the light cavalry of the Republic of Venice . They fought for it since the 13th century and they were originally from Dalmatia and Albania . It features the balcony, and in the small courtyard, a bronze statue of Juliet . It is one of the most visited sites in the town . The metal of its chest is worn bare due to a legend that if a person strokes the right breast of the statue, that person will have good fortune and luck in love . </P> <P> Many people write their names and the names of their beloved ones on the walls of the entrance, known as Juliet's wall . Many believe that writing on that place will make their love everlasting . After a restoration and cleaning of the building, it was intended that further writing should be on replaceable panels or white sheets placed outside the wall . </P>

Who do researchers think the capulet family is based on