One Asks Oneself Whether This Town Has Greatly Changed Since Roman
Times.
To be sure it has; domestic calamities and earthquakes (such as
the terrible one of 1456) have altered it beyond recognition.
The
amphitheatre that seated ten thousand spectators is merged into the
earth, and of all the buildings of Roman date nothing is left save a
pile of masonry designated as the tomb of the Marcellus who was killed
here by Hannibal's soldiery, and a few reticulated walls of the second
century or thereabouts known as the "House of Horace" - as genuine as
that of Juliet in Verona or the Mansion of Loreto. Yet the tradition is
an old one, and the builder of the house, whoever he was, certainly
displayed some poetic taste in his selection of a fine view across the
valley. There is an indifferent statue of Horace in the marketplace. A
previous one, also described as Horace, was found to be the effigy of
somebody else. Thus much I learn from Lupoli's "Iter Venusinum."
But there are ancient inscriptions galore, worked into the masonry of
buildings or lying about at random. Mommsen has collected numbers of
them in his Corpus, and since that time some sixty new ones have been
discovered. And then - the stone lions of Roman days, couched forlornly
at street corners, in courtyards and at fountains, in every stage of
decrepitude, with broken jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa
is a veritable infirmary for mutilated antiques of this species.
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