Walk from Tivoli Train Station to Villa 'd'Este. Go to the right.. - Tivoli Italy - ECTV

Tivoli (/ˈtɪvəli/, Italian: [ˈtiːvoli]; Latin: Tibur) is a town and comune in Lazio, central Italy, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) east-north-east of Rome, at the falls of the Aniene river where it issues from the Sabine hills. The city offers a wide view over the Roman Campagna.
Gaius Julius Solinus cites Cato the Elder's lost Origines for the story that the city was founded by Catillus the Arcadian, a son of Amphiaraus, who came there having escaped the slaughter at Thebes, Greece. Catillus and his three sons Tiburtus, Coras, and Catillus[i] drove out the Siculi from the Aniene plateau and founded a city they named Tibur in honor of Tiburtus.[3] According to another account, Tibur was a colony of Alba Longa. Historical traces of settlement in the area date back to the thirteenth century BC. Tibur may share a common root with the river Tiber and the Latin praenomen Tiberius.[4]
From Etruscan times Tibur, a Sabine city, was the seat of the Tiburtine Sibyl. There are two small temples above the falls, the rotunda traditionally associated with Vesta and the rectangular one with the Sibyl of Tibur, whom Varro calls Albunea, the water nymph who was worshipped on the banks of the Anio as a tenth Sibyl added to the nine mentioned by the Greek writers. In the nearby woods, Faunus had a sacred grove. During the Roman age Tibur maintained a certain importance, being on the way (the Via Tiburtina, extended as the Via Valeria) that Romans had to follow to cross the mountain regions of the Apennines towards the Abruzzo, the region where lived some of its fiercest enemies such as Volsci, Sabines, and Samnites.
At first an independent ally of Rome, Tibur allied itself with the Gauls in 361 BC. Vestiges remain of its defensive walls of this period, in opus quadratum. In 338 BC, however, Tibur was defeated and absorbed by the Romans. The city acquired Roman citizenship in 90 BC and became a resort area famed for its beauty and its good water, and was enriched by many Roman villas. The most famous one, of which the ruins remain, is the Villa Adriana (Hadrian's Villa). Maecenas and Augustus also had villas at Tibur, and the poet Horace had a modest villa: he and Catullus and Statius all mention Tibur in their poems. In 273, Zenobia, the captive queen of Palmyra, was assigned a residence here by the Emperor Aurelian. The second-century temple of Hercules Victor is being excavated. The present Piazza del Duomo occupies the Roman forum.
Waterfalls of Tivoli, Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, 1745-1750
The name of the city came to be used in diminutive form as Tiburi instead of Tibur and so transformed through Tibori to Tiboli and finally to Tivoli.[citation needed] Its inhabitants, however, are still called Tiburtini and not Tivolesi.
In 547, in the course of the Gothic War, the city was fortified by the Byzantine general Belisarius, but was later destroyed by Totila's army. After the end of the war it became a Byzantine duchy, later absorbed into the Patrimony of St. Peter. After Italy was conquered by Charlemagne, Tivoli was under the authority of a count, representing the emperor.
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