yon shadowy dome,
The glory of the earth, Eternal Rome.

No picture of the spot can be more graphic than are these noble lines.
They open a Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, says
tradition, by its brilliant author in a single night. (R. C. Sewell,
Magdalen College, 1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those who
stand to-day beside the Temple of the Sibyl on the edge of its ravine,
who enjoy the fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser
Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the Grottos of the Sirens
and of Neptune, understand how a poet's genius can, as Shakespeare
tells us, shadow forth things unseen, and give them local habitation.

From Tibur, still beside the Anio, we drive for about seven miles, until
we reach the ancient Varia, now Vico Varo, mentioned by Horace as the
small market town to which his five tenant-farmers were wont to repair
for agricultural or municipal business. (Ep. I, xiv, 3.) Here, then, we
are in the poet's country, and must be guided by the landmarks in his
verse. Just beyond Vico Varo the Anio is joined by the Licenza. This is
Horace's Digentia, the stream he calls it whose icy waters freshen him,
the stream of which Mandela drinks. (Ep. I, xviii, 104-105.) And there,
on its opposite bank, is the modern village Bardela, identified with
Mandela by a sepulchral inscription recently dug up. We turn northward,
following the stream; the road becomes distressingly steep, recalling
a line in which the poet speaks of returning homeward "to his mountain
stronghold." (Sat. II, vi, 16.) Soon we reach a village, Roccagiovine,
whose central square is named Piazza Vacuna. Vacuna was the ancient name
for the goddess Victory; and against the wall is fixed an exhumed tablet
telling how the Emperor Vespasian here restored an ancient Temple of
Victory. One more echo this name wakes in Horatian ears--he dates a
letter to his friend Aristius Fuscus as written "behind the crumbling
shrine of Vacuna." (Ep. I, x, 49.) Clearly we are near him now; he
would not carry his writing tablets far away from his door. Yet another
verification we require. He speaks of a spring just beside his home, cool
and fine, medicinal to head and stomach. (Ep. I, xvi, 12.) Here it is,
hard by, called to-day Fonte d'Oratini, a survival, we should like to
believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close at hand must have been
the villa, on one side or the other of a small hill now called Monte
Roton