House of Virgil
- Type
- Monuments
- Area
- City centre
- Time
- about 10 min
- When
- any time, evenings included
According to tradition, Virgil lived and died here. Brindisi, then the land of the Calabri, is also where, according to legend, Aeneas landed, and Brindisi's writers have always pointed to this as the poet's house.
The oldest record is in a sixteenth-century document, and not all scholars are convinced it is authentic, even though the plaque on the façade, put up for the two-thousandth anniversary of Virgil's birth, treats it as certain. Then again, in 1529 the city was sacked and many records were lost.
Nothing of the ancient building can be seen from outside: at the end of the nineteenth century an owner enclosed it within his house. The house is private and can only be visited on special days, thanks to the Faldetta Museum and the owners' goodwill.
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