The frescoed halls of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli show the compendium of renaissance art. Villas rich in frescoes, grotesques, stucco decorations and elements that exalt the virtues, politics and the origin of the family buyer. In the specific case of Villa d'Este the cardinal Ippolito d'Este, so a member of this aristocratic family, who initially followed the work of the home that had to be the right residence for a cardinal and a member of the Este family, tried to pay homage to Tivoli, the ancient Tibur Superbum for the Romans.

A city that, according to its founding myth, was founded even before the Caput Mundi, thanks to three brothers: Tiburto, Corace and music box. They were exiled from Greece, descendants of one of the seven kings of Thebes, to confirm the legend that saw the city and the community that developed on the Italian peninsula as the direct descendants of the Greeks. The three, newly landed on the coast of Lazio (the region where Rome is located), had to deal with the Sicilians, powerful the native population, and then take the territory along the valley of the Aniene and found immediately their new city: Tibur, by the name of the older brother. Conquered the territory, the three celebrated the victory with sacrifices to the gods, thanking in particular Hercules (demi god who was very important and popular in the ancient Tibur), which would have given a hand to the brothers in order to achieve the victory and in the preservation of the power. Moreover the three brothers would be dug, by means of a plough drawn by oxen, the pomerium, the boundary sacred that marked the center of the city, sacred to the gods. In this way they honored the gods themselves, basically giving them the centerpiece of the new center founded. To get an idea of how the myths may be similar, the same thing had Romulus on the top of the Palatine Hill in the founding act of Rome.

There are various versions of the myth, but what matters is how the legacy mythology of our ancestors is always present, so much that you want to be immortalized by those men of the Renaissance that, more than others, began to dig deep into our origins. A villa like this one at Tivoli, after all, represents just this: the halls and rooms are covered with stucco and painted decorations, many times aimed at the exaltation of the founding myth of Tivoli, a town well-known already at the time of the Romans. Indirectly the cardinal Ippolito was able, to emphasize his personal prestige, because he had established his home here in Tibur Superbum. And these magnificent rooms with frescoes, drawing on the Greek and roman mythology, serve precisely this: to fill us with eyes of wonder, but also to make us understand the social status of the owner of the house.