The hill town whose name Copenhagen borrowed for its famous pleasure gardens
Tivoli sits where the Aniene river tumbles out of the Sabine Hills, 30 kilometres from Rome. Emperors built villas there, a captive queen of Palmyra lived out her exile there, and its quarries supplied the travertine of Roman monuments. Its gardens were so admired that pleasure parks in Paris and Copenhagen took its name.
Ancient Tibur claimed a Greek founding: Cato the Elder, as cited by Solinus, credited Catillus the Arcadian, a refugee from Thebes whose son Tiburtus gave the place its name. Another tradition made it a colony of Alba Longa, and settlement traces reach back to the thirteenth century BC. The town was home to the Tiburtine Sibyl, and two little temples still stand above the falls, a round one linked to Vesta and a rectangular one to the prophetess. Tibur sided with the Gauls in 361 BC, fell to Rome in 338 BC and won citizenship in 90 BC.
Good water and scenery made it a Roman retreat. Hadrian's Villa is the grandest ruin, but Augustus and Maecenas also built here, and Horace kept a modest house that he, Catullus and Statius all wrote about. In 273 the emperor Aurelian lodged Zenobia of Palmyra in the town. The Sanctuary of Hercules Victor, from the second century BC, covered 188 by 140 metres, making it one of central Italy's largest buildings, and a later amphitheatre seated about 6,000.
In the Middle Ages Tivoli governed itself through elected consuls and was Rome's fiercest rival for control of central Lazio, until Otto III took it in 1001 and papal authority followed. Tower houses in its lanes recall those feuding decades. Pope Pius II raised the Rocca Pia fortress in 1461 to cow the restless townsfolk, and in 1550 Pirro Ligorio began the Villa d'Este for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, a World Heritage Site since 2001.
After a ruinous flood in 1826, Pope Gregory XVI had a tunnel cut through Monte Catillo, creating the Great Waterfall and the Villa Gregoriana in 1835. Allied bombing in 1944 destroyed the Jesuit church. Today the falls help power the lights of Rome, paper-making is the chief industry, and the Temple of Vesta has a copy in Germany's Dessau-Worlitz garden realm: the Worlitz Synagogue.
Source: Tivoli, Lazio
