Monumento a Virgilio

Virgil was returning from Greece, where he had revisited his unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid. He had asked Augustus for permission to burn the manuscript, judging it imperfect, but the illness he caught on the journey gave him no escape: he died in this port city at fifty-one, taking with him the secret of those verses.

There is something moving in the fact that the author of arma virumque cano died in a harbour: he who had sung the voyage of Aeneas across the Mediterranean passed away looking at the same sea. The monument is plain, almost austere, in pale limestone, and it remembers the man before the poet: someone who came this far and stopped here forever.