VILLA ADRIANA. 189 we passed down a shady lane, and stopped at the gate of Hadrian's Villa. Alighting here, we passed into that wide and wondrous wilderness of ruin, through avenues dark with cypress, and steep banks purple with violets. The air was heavy with perfume. The glades were carpeted with daisies, wild periwinkle, and white and yellow crocus-blooms. We stepped aside into a grassy arena which was once the Greek theatre, and sate upon a fallen cornice. There was the narrow shelf of stage on which the agonies of Edipus and Prometheus were once rehearsed; there was the tiny altar which stood between the audience and the actors, and consecrated the play; there, row above row, were the seats of the spectators. Now, the very stage was a mere thicket of brambles; and a little thrush lighted on the altar, while we were sitting by, and filled all the silent space with song. "Passing hence, we came next upon open fields, partly cultivated, and partly cumbered with shapeless mounds of fallen masonry. Here, in the shadow of a gigantic stone pine, we found a sheet of mosaic pavement, glowing with all its marbles in the sun; and close by, half buried in deep grass, a shattered column of the richest porphyry. Then came an olive plantation; another theatre; the fragments of a temple; and a long line of vaulted cells, some of which contained the remains of baths and conduits, and were tapestried within with masses of the delicate maiden-hair fern. Separated from these by a wide space of grass, amid which a herd of goats waded and fed at their pleasure, rose a pile of reticulated wall, with part of a vast hall yet standing, upon the vaulted roof of which, sharp and perfect, as if moulded yesterday, were encrusted delicate bas-reliefs of white stucco, representing groups of Cupids, musical instruments, and figures reclining at table. Near this spot, on a rising ground formed all of ruins, overgrown with grass and underwood, we sate down to rest, and contemplate the view. A deep romantic valley opened before us, closed in on either side by hanging woods of olive and ilex, with here and there a group of dusky junipers, or a solitary pine, rising like a dark green parasol above all its neighbours. Interspersed among these, and scattered about the foreground, were mountainous heaps of buttressed wall, arch, vault, and gallery, all more or less shattered out of form, or green with ivy. At the bottom of the valley, forming, as it were, the extreme boundary of the middle distance, rose two steep volcanic hills, each crowned with a little white town, that seemed to wink and glitter in the sun; while beyond these again, undulating, melancholy, stretching mysteriously away for miles and miles in the blue distance, lay the wastes of the Campagna."-Barbara's History: "Autour de moi, à travers les arcades des ruines, s'ouvraient des points de vue sur la campagne romaine des buissons de sureau remplissaient les salles désertes, où venaient se réfugier quelques merles solitaires; les fragments de maçonnerie étaient tapissés de feuilles de scolopendre, dont la verdure satinée se dessinait comme un travail en mosaïque sur la blancheur des marbres. Cà et là de hauts cyprès remplaçaient les colonnes tombées dans ces palais de la mort. L'acanthe sauvage rampait à leurs pieds sur des débris, comme si la nature s'était plu à reproduire sur ces chefs d'oeuvre inutiles de l'architecture l'ornement de leur beauté passée; les salles diverses, et les sommités des ruines, ressemblaient à des corbeilles et à des bouquets de verdure; le vent en agitait les guirlandes humides, et les plantes s'inclinaient sous la pluie du ciel."-Chateaubriand.* The villa formed part of a large estate purchased by Pius VI. It is now the property of his representative, Duke Braschi. On Monte Affliano, which rises behind the Villa Adriana, to the south of Tivoli, most authorities place the site of the Latin city Æsula. The mountain of Tivoli is divided into three positions: Ripoli, towards the town; Spaccato, in the centre; and Monte Affliano, at the southern extremity. Porphyrion has accurately described the position of Æsula as on this southern extremity of the centre of Tibur. "Udum Tibur propter aquarum copiam. alterius in latere montis constitutæ." Æsula, nomen urbis, There are remains of a city having stood here. "Æsula declive contempleris arvum." Horace, iii. Ode 29. It was probably deserted on account of its inconvenient situation, and the temple of Bona Dea or Ops was its representative, in later times.t A winding road, constructed by the Braschi, winds up the The powerful description of Chateaubriand cannot be realized now, but is inserted, in the hope that when the reign of Signor Rosa is over, Nature will be permitted to restore the ruins of the Villa Adriana to their former beauty. ↑ See Gell's "Topography of Rome and its Vicinity." ASCENT TO TIVOLI. 191 hill to Tivoli, through magnificent olive-groves, the silvery trunks of the old trees caverned, loop-holed, and twisted in every possible contortion. "It is well to have felt and seen the olive-tree; to have loved it fo Christ's sake, partly also for the helmed Wisdom's sake which was to the heathen in some sort as that nobler Wisdom which stood at God's right hand, when he founded the earth and established the heavens: to have loved it, even to the hoary dimness of its delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; and to have traced, line by line, the gnarled writhing of its intricate branches, and the pointed petals of its light and narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the small rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the beads of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs-the right, in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow,-and, more than all, the softness of the mantle, silver grey, and tender like the down on a bird's breast, with which, far away, it veils the undulation of the mountains."—Ruskin, Stones of Venice, iii. 176. As we drive slowly up the ascent it may be pleasant to consider the history of Tibur, which claims to go back much further than that of Rome. Dionysius says that it was a city of the Siculi, and called Siculetum or Sicilis, and that the original inhabitants were expelled by Tiburtus, Corax, and Catillus, the three grandsons of Amphiaraus, the king and prophet of Thebes, who flourished a century before the Trojan war. Tibur was named after the eldest of the brothers. "Tum gemini fratres Tiburtia mœnia linquunt, "Jam monia Tiburis udi Æn. vii. 670. Stabant, Argolicæ quod posuere manus.” Ovid. Fast. iv. 71. "Nullam, Vare, sacrâ vite prius severis arborem Horace, Od. 1. xviii. 1. "Hic tua Tiburtes Faunos chelys et juvat ipsum The inhabitants of Tibur frequently incurred the anger of Rome by assistance they gave to the Gauls upon their inroads into Latium, and they were completely subdued by Camillus in B.C. 335. Ovid narrates how when they were requested to send back the Roman pipers, "tibicines," who had seceded to Tibur from offence which they had taken at an edict of the censors, they made them drunk, and took them thus in carts to Rome. "Exilio mutant urbem, Tiburque recedunt ! -Exilium quodam tempore Tibur erat !- Alliciunt somnos tempus, motusque, merumque, Jamque per Esquilias Romanam intraverat urbem ; Fasti, vi. 665. The second line of this passage expresses the fact that Tibur was an asylum for Roman fugitives, a result of its never having been admitted to the Roman franchise. In his Pontic Epistles, also, Ovid says : "Quid referam veteres Romanæ gentis, apud quos Pont. 1. El. 3. Brutus and Cassius are said to have fled thither after the murder of Cæsar. Under the earlier emperors, Tibur was the favourite retreat of the wealthy Romans,-the Richmond of Rome-and, as such, it was celebrated by the poets. It was also the scene of the nominal imprisonment of Zenobia, BEAUTY OF TIVOLI. 193 the brave and accomplished Queen of Palmyra, who lived here like a Roman matron, after having appeared in the She was presented with a beautiful "Here the Syrian queen insensibly triumph of Aurelian. villa by the Emperor. sunk into a Roman matron, her daughters married into noble families, and her race was not yet extinct in the fifth century." In an earlier age, Syphax, king of Numidia, died here B.C. 201, having been brought from Africa to adorn the triumph of Scipio. The town was surrendered by the Isaurian garrisons, which Belisarius had placed there, to the Goths under Totila, who both burnt and rebuilt it. In the eighth century the name was changed to Tivoli. In the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines it bore a prominent part and was generally on the imperial side. The climate of Tivoli was esteemed remarkably healthy, and was considered to have the property of blanching ivory. "Quale micat, semperque novum est, quod Tiburis aura Sil. Ital. xii. 229. "Lilia tu vincis, nec adhuc delapsa ligustra, Et Tiburtino monte quod albet ebur. Martial, viii. 28. But since the existence of malaria, modern poetry has told a "Tivoli di mal conforto, O piove, o tira vento, o suona a morte." As we ascend the hill, its wonderful beauty becomes more striking at every turn. "The hill of Tivoli is all over picture. The town, the villas, the ruins, the rocks, the cascades, in the foreground; the Sabine hills, the three Monticelli, Soracte, Frascati, the Campagna, and Rome in the VOL. I. * Gibbon, ch. xi. 13 |