“… Ascanius then, / Now call’d Iulus, shall begin his reign. / He thirty rolling years the crown shall wear, / Then from Lavinium shall the seat transfer, / And, with hard labor, Alba Longa build” (Aeneid, Book One, vv. 267-271).  Upon arriving in Irving, University of Dallas students receive an immediate orientation to the primacy of place.

In their first semester, they grapple with Virgil’s epic “Aeneid,” in which they read of Ascanius, son of Aeneas and founder of Alba Longa. Beginning with Livy’s “History of Rome,” some have identified the area around Lago Albano — that “hill-embosomed lake” near Castel Gandolfo, as Mary Shelley called it in her short story “Sisters of Albano” — as the site of historical Alba Longa.