Acknowledgments
This volume grew from the humble beginnings of a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (2014, New York) on Aeneas’s tour of the site of future Rome remade as Farnese panegyric. A repeat performance at the Latin poetry composition workshop Inter Versiculos II organized by the inimitable Gina Soter amid the balmy seclusion of a Sicilian farmhouse (July 2016) secured the friendship that has resulted in this collaboration. As our debt of gratitude, the authors dedicate this work to Gina.
There remains the pleasant duty of recording other thanks. First and foremost to Antonella Altorio and David Chacon for painstakingly transcribing and typing the entire text of the Caprarola, while at the same time providing numerous dinners and boundless hospitality. Derek Cebrian created the bibliography and painstakingly checked and cross-referenced. Isabela Alongi, Jirapat Chaisilp, and Jaxon Cooper made the Maps and Plans. Jean Schofield once again proofread and made innumerable suggestions for improvement. Thanks for help of various kinds go to Fabio Barry, Simon Ditchfield, Maria Galli Stampino, Mallory Ann Hayes, Rosie Lehmann, Bernhard Schirg, and Keith Sidwell. Thanks must also be given to Tim Page who caught many slips at the proof-reading stage and all the staff at Brill, Marlou Meems in particular, for their hard work in preparing the manuscript for the press and to Raymond Paas for the Index. The authors are grateful to Colgate University and The American University of Rome for their support of this publication.
The epigraph, in which Virgil celebrates the transformation of the Capitol under the emperor Augustus (aurea nunc ‘golden now’), is here applied to baroque building projects across Rome (olim silvestris horrida dumis, ‘once bristling with thorn bushes’) and Lazio and used metaphorically to refer to the censorship of pagan elements from the neo-Latin poetry of the Catholic Reformation. Indeed, in 1582 these verses were remade to celebrate the opening of the Via Tarpeia across the Capitol Hill. The inscription is still in place. It reads:
HINC AD TARPEIAM SEDEM ET CAPITOLIA DVCIT
PERVIA NVNC OLIM SILVESTRIBUS HORRIDA DVMIS
GREGORIVS XIII PONT(ifex) MAX(imus) VIAM TARPEIAM APERVIT | HIER(onimus) ALTERIUS AEDILIS SECVNDO | PAVLVS BVBALVS AEDILIS SEXTO CVRABANT | ANNO DOMINI MDLXXXII
From here it leads to the Tarpeian rock and the Capitol, Penetrable now, once bristling with thorn bushes.
Pope Gregory XIII opened the Via Tarpeia. Hieronimo Altieri aedile for the second time, Paolo Del Bufalo aedile for the sixth time took care of this in the year of our Lord 1582.