The legend of Romulus and Remus begins at Alba Longa in the Alban Hills and ends on Rome's Palatine and Aventine hills, with a she-wolf's cave and a fig tree along the Tiber in between. The bronze Capitoline Wolf still carries the story to visitors on the Capitoline Hill.
The route follows the myth from the twins' birth to the quarrel that leaves Romulus as founder. Most sites are traditional rather than proven, and the stops say so.
Troy has fallen. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, carries his old father out of the burning city and sets sail with the survivors to find the new homeland the gods have promised them. Virgil's Aeneid, written for Augustus in the 20s BC, follows years of wrong turns, storms and prophecies until the exiles land in Italy, where their descendants will one day found Rome.
This route follows the voyage in the order it happens, which is not the order Virgil tells it: the poem opens in Carthage and lets Aeneas recount the earlier wanderings to Queen Dido. Every stop is a real ancient site, most now open as archaeological parks; Aeneas himself belongs to legend. Quotations are from John Dryden's 1697 translation.
