Horace's Villa

The identification is likely because Horace wrote several poems about the place, and the special elaborate architectural features and location of the villa correspond to the descriptions in the poetry.

Horace, in a letter to his friend Quintius,[2] describes in glowing terms the country villa which his patron, Maecenas, had given him: "It lies on a range of hills, broken by a shady valley which is so placed that the sun when rising strikes the right side, and when descending in his flying chariot, warms the left.

You would like the climate; and if you were to see my fruit trees, bearing ruddy cornils and plums, my oaks and ilex supplying food to my herds, and abundant shade to the master, you would say, Tarentum in its beauty has been brought near to Rome!

Lucas Holstenius (a mid-17th-century geographer and a librarian at the Vatican Library) showed that the Romans associated the Sabine deity with their goddess Victoria mentioned in an inscription in Roccagiovine near Licenza and the site as Fanum Vacunae.

The site chosen for the villa and its baths is unusual, as a saddle between a small hill to the east and the slopes of Colle Rotondo to the west was terraced (as described by Horace: an arx enclosed by mountains[9]) to create wide, level surfaces for gardens and agricultural areas as well as extraordinary views.

Black and white mosaics from the Flavian dynasty, marble wall revetment and architectonic elements, an elaborate water system, have been found.

The villa began more modestly in the Republican era and early empire (2nd c. BC to 1st c. AD) around an atrium (a space later divided into rooms 38–40) and smaller garden and pool.

A sign of the luxurious decoration of the villa is the spectacular Rosone Lacunare, a beautiful marble ceiling rose carved with acanthus leaves, frogs and crabs.

Writers such as Catullus and Tibullus began to own villas in the Tivoli area, continuing for a century and attracted perhaps by the great library housed in the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor.