3-021-626 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The new overland route to India: the house of Virgil, Brindisi, 1869. '...it was here...that [Roman poet] Virgil died, when he came back from his visit to Greece, twenty-two years after the date of his merry journey to Brundusium in the delightful companionship of Horace. They say Virgil was buried at Brindisi.; but others say, on the contrary, he was buried at Naples. Here is a building...reputed to be Virgil's house. It stands close to the two columns, a narrow street being all that separates them. This street is possibly a remnant of the Via Appia. One half of the house is evidently more modern than the other, the junction of the two being visible in the external stonework. The large stone troughs seen in our Artist's Sketch are used for washing clothes in this part of the country. The woman who lives in the house cannot understand what it is that brings strangers to look at it. To enter the house you have to enter by the door on the right and pass through the house of one family; ascend a ladderlike stair, without a railing, which lands on a very loose floor with no railing round the opening for the stairs; and then through to the house of Virgil, which is at present in no way different from the other houses in the town'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.