City
Mantua
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Mantua, the home town of Virgil, is drawn on the Tabula with the usual pair of towers. The poet was born in the nearby village of Andes and lost his family estate when Augustus handed out land to his veterans after the civil war. The Roman writer Pliny calls the city an Etruscan foundation. It stood on a small island amid the marshes of the river Mincius, reached by wooden bridges. On the map, the distance figure to neighbouring Bedriacum has dropped out, and the road drawn on to Hostilia barely shows up in modern reconstructions of the Roman network.